his village, layered and shadowed, mysterious with hidden worlds and subtle undertones. It is a world where an image from childhood – the body of a drowned fishmonger – may suddenly lurch into view from the hidden and mossy depths of memory; a world of silences and violent deletions, where much lies unsaid but never unimplied between red scribbles on college ID cards and intensely charged lines of verse.

“Someone said something is missing in my poems,” says the poet in one of his poems. In a moment of distilled insight (which reminds one all over again why poetry when it works triumphs over more elaborate prose routes to discovery), he arrives at the reason. The reason is wilful blindness, the deliberate obliteration of all that makes the humancontested battleground states, including Florida, Nevada, and Ohio. The turnout of young voters increased across the country, too. In the years ahead, Obama cannot let this powerful asset go to waste.

One misstep of Obama’s first term was his failure to continue tapping into young people’s advocacy and passion in the way his campaign did in the run-up to the election. The same young people who worked tirelessly to register volunteers and enlist canvassers would have gladly toiled as petitioners, picketers, and op-ed writers. If only someone had called on them as a group.

As a special correspondent for PBS this election cycle, I crisscrossed the country to try to piece together a portrait of the youth vote. From the Hoosier heartland to battleground states like Pennsylvania, from campuses in