Publisher Description

The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history.

Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Back Cover

19th Poet Laureate of the United States

Author Biography

NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the 2012 poet laureate of the United States, and Native Guard, her third collection of poetry, received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

Table of Contents

Elegy3 * Miracle of the Black Leg9 On Captivity13 Taxonomy16 1. DE ESPA

Review

Nominated for NAACP Image Award Los Angeles Time Holiday Books Guide, Poetry Goodreads Choice Awards 2012 Finalist, Best Poetry Finalist, 2013 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award Finalist, 2013 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist, 2013 Phillis Wheatley Book Award, Poetry "In poems that again exhibit her gift for finding in microcosmic form the specter of societal relations, Trethewey makes explicit historically ignored ideas that underlie (a very literal) enlightenment."--Booklist "Thrall's poems draw on Mexico's casta aintings, which were created to catalog the mixed-blood peoples living there under colonial Spanice rule...on a subject ripe with the perfidies and paradoxes of thralldom both personal and public, it is utterly elegant." --Elle Magazine "[Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human struggles that we all face." --James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress "Natasha Trethewey's Thrall is simply the finest work of her already distinguished career. This remarkable collection carries the reader from troubling ekphrastic reflections upon colonial depictions of mixed race--meditations of superbly nuanced cultural and historical resonance--to a stunningly personal album of self-portraits of the poet with her father. Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal histories felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound." --David St. John "In poems of exquisite tact and clarity, Natasha Trethewey confronts the excruciating differentials of racial mapping and the will-to-knowledge such mapping represents. Through the serial shocks of historical and personal discovery, through meticulous inventories of human division and turnings-aside, above all through "the dark amendment" of acknowledged bonds--the "Thrall" of her title--these poems probe the very foundations of reciprocal understanding." --Linda Gregerson --

Review Quote

"Utterly elegant." -Elle Magazine

Excerpt from Book

Elegy For my father I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us--everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places-- you upstream a few yards and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots and you grew heavier with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide''s casting then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried--again and again--to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river''s surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past--working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I''d write--one day-- when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding-- my back to where I know we are headed. Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata After the painting by Diego Vel

Description for Bookstore

HMH hardcover, 2014 Previous ISBN: 978-0-547-57160-7

Details