**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
