Monument : poems : new and selected

Title:

Author:

Trethewey, Natasha D., 1966- author.

ISBN:

9781328507846

Personal Author:

Trethewey, Natasha D., 1966- author.

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

Publication Information:

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Physical Description:

189 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

"Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Natasha Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, her first retrospective volume, draws together verses that delineate the stories of working-class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in casta paintings, Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of upheaval and loss, resilience and love.... As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

American poetry -- 21st century.

Genre:

Poetry.

Alternate display:

2018

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2312509

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Betty Rodriguez Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	811 TRE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fig Garden Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	811 TRE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mosqueda Center Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	811 TRE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Urgent new poems on race and gender inequality, and select poems drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey.

Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey's first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, and Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love.

In this setting, each poem drawn from an "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* weaves and interlocks with those that come before and those that follow. As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very foundation of the vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future.

*Academy of American Poets' chancellor Marilyn Nelson

"[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, 13th Librarian of Congress

Author Notes

NATASHA TRETHEWEY, two term U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and 2017 Heinz Award recipient, has written four collections of poetry and one book of nonfiction. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow, she is currently Board of Trustees professor of English at Northwestern University. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Trethewey (Thrall) culls some of the finest work from her illustrious two-decade career and presents formally diverse new poems exploring her customary themes. She dredges family history both dark and luminous, reliving the trauma of her mother's murder by her stepfather, reiterating the details as if the outcome might be different. The brilliant, evocative "Genus Narcissus" turns sinister as the poet recalls giving her mother daffodils as a child only to watch them wither and die on the windowsill: "Be taken with yourself,/ they said to me; Die early, to my mother." Trethewey also evocatively imagines her grandmother in 1940s Mississippi, writing "She can fill a room// with a loud clear alto, broom-dance/ right out the back door, her heavy footsteps// a parade beneath the stars." The ekphrastic series "Bellocq's Ophelia" voices a mixed-race prostitute from a famous 1912 photograph by E.J Bellocq as she sits for her portrait: "I try to recall what I was thinking-/ how not to be exposed, though naked, how/ to wear skin like a garment, seamless." Trethewey's arresting images, urgent tone, and surgically precise language meld with exacting use of rhyme and anaphora create an intensity that propels the poems forward. This collection is ideal for new readers seeking a representative sample of Trethewey's best work. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Trethewey's genius for dovetailing the personal and the communal, the impressionistic and the factual, was evident from the start, and her first book of poems, Domestic Work (2000), kicks off this magnificent new and selected collection. A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Heinz Award, scholar and poet Trethewey mines documents, scrutinizes paintings and photographs, and transforms concrete objects into engines of emotion and memories as she excavates her southern home ground and illuminates the lives of African Americans, especially women. Here are breathtaking persona poems depicting New Orleans' Storyville from Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), exploring the shocking fate of the first black Union army regiment in Native Guard (2006), and offering tribute to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in Congregation (2014). Biracialism is a root theme for Trethewey. It is the heart of Thrall (2012) and propels the 10 exquisitely mournful yet determined new poems. For all the tragic, overlooked history Trethewey reclaims with clarion lyricism, it is her own family complexities and terrible loss that reverberate most. Monument is an essential volume of piercing wit, elegiac beauty, profound insights intimate and cultural, and the sustaining power of remembrance.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist

Excerpts

Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says, My mother would never put up with that. Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time your father says, But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that? -- don't waste your breath explaining, again, how abusers wait, are patient, that they don't beat you on the first date, sometimes not even the first few years of a marriage. Keep an impassive face whenever you hear Stand by Your Man, and let go your rage when you recall those words were advice given your mother. Try to forget the first trial, before she was dead, when the charge was only attempted murder; don't belabor the thinking or the sentence that allowed her ex-husband's release a year later, or the juror who said, It's a domestic issue -- they should work it out themselves. Just breathe when, after you read your poems about grief, a woman asks, Do you think your mother was weak for men? Learn to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought- cloud above your head, dark and heavy with the words you cannot say; let silence rain down. Remember you were told, by your famous professor, that you should write about something else, unburden yourself of the death of your mother and just pour your heart out in the poems. Ask yourself what's in your heart, that reliquary -- blood locket and seedbed -- and contend with what it means, the folk saying you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother's body in the ground but in the chest, or -- like you -- you carry her corpse on your back. I from DOMESTIC WORK Limen All day I've listened to the industry of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree just outside my window. Hard at his task, his body is a hinge, a door knocker to the cluttered house of memory in which I can almost see my mother's face. She is there, again, beyond the tree, its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves, hanging wet sheets on the line -- each one a thin white screen between us. So insistent is this woodpecker, I'm sure he must be looking for something else -- not simply the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift the tree might hold. All day he's been at work, tireless, making the green hearts flutter. Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky It is 1965. I am not yet born, only a fullness beneath the Empire waist of my mother's blue dress. The ruffles at her neck are waves of light in my father's eyes. He carries a slim volume, leather-bound, poems to read as they walk. The long road past the college, through town, rises and falls before them, the blue hills shimmering at twilight. The stacks at the distillery exhale, and my parents breathe evening air heady and sweet as Kentucky bourbon. They are young and full of laughter, the sounds in my mother's throat rippling down into my blood. My mother, who will not reach forty-one, steps into the middle of a field, lies down among clover and sweet grass, right here, right now -- dead center of her life. Family Portrait Before the picture man comes Mama and I spend the morning cleaning the family room. She hums Motown, doles out chores, a warning -- He has no legs, she says. Don't stare. I'm first to the door when he rings. My father and uncle lift his chair onto the porch, arrange his things near the place his feet would be. He poses our only portrait -- my father sitting, Mama beside him, and me in between. I watch him bother the space for knees, shins, scratching air as -- years later -- I'd itch for what's not there. Excerpted from Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.