One morning this March, Ada Limón looked out the window of her home in Kentucky and saw a bird unlike any she’d ever seen. Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, has loved birds since childhood and takes pleasure in learning their names. Yet the one clinging to her feeder was unfamiliar. “Of course, I didn’t have my glasses on,” she says. Suddenly she realized what she was seeing: an upside-down female cardinal, made strange by its inversion. “I just started laughing.” That Limón’s discovery yielded delight, not disappointment, might speak to her work as a poet, helping readers perceive anew what they could easily dismiss as commonplace. Likewise, when she chose the name for her signature project as Poet Laureate, she picked a phrase well-known to anyone who has ever perused a trail guide or museum map: YOU ARE HERE. The declaration serves as the title for a series of poetry installations in National Parks that Limón will preside over this year, as...