Natasha D Trethewey

"A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy."--Dust jacket.

From sonnets and traditional ballads to free verses shot through with the syncopated attitude of blues, these poems tells the story of black women's work by the poet laureate and 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Natasha Trethewey's muscular, luminous poems explore the complex memory of the American South--history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the ''Native Guard'', one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In Trethewey's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. ''Native Guard'' is both...

A collection of poems offers glimpses into the life and thoughts of an African American prostitute in pre-World War I New Orleans.