Monument: Poems New and Selected

Description

With singular craft, Natasha Trethewey’s poems respond to the trauma of our national wounds and our shared racial history. Urgent, defiant—against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy both intangible or graven in stone—Trethewey gives pedestal and voice to unsung icons. Here is verse delineating working-class African Americans, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first all-black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through it all, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet’s own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love.