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by Natasha Trethewey (Author)
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.
- Historical Poetry: Trethewey confronts the past, from colonial casta paintings to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, weaving personal and national histories into a seamless, searing narrative.
- Confessional Poetry: An intimate exploration of a daughter's complicated love for her poet father, examining the small estrangements and shared histories that bind them.
- African American Poetry: A vital work that interrogates the language of taxonomy, the legacy of slavery, and the construction of mixed-race identity in the American story.
- Southern Literature: Rooted in the landscape and legacy of the Deep South, these poems capture its complex beauty and painful inheritance with fearless precision.
Back Jacket
19th Poet Laureate of the United States
Ripe with the perfidies and paradoxes of thralldom both personal and public, it is utterly elegant. Elle
Charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces that determine the roles to which a mixed-race daughter and her white father are consigned. In a brilliant series of poems about the taxonomies of mixed unions, Natasha Trethewey creates a fluent and vivid backdrop to her own familial predicament. While tropes about captivity, bondage, knowledge, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey unflinchingly examines our shared past by reflecting on her history of small estrangements and by confronting the complexities of race and the deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference in America.
Natasha Trethewey s Thrall is simply the finest work of her already distinguished career . . . Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal histories felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound. David St. John, author of The Face: A Novella in Verse
A voice that not only expands the position of [poetry], but helps us better understand ourselves. Her poems tell stories of loss and reckoning, both personal and historical. Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress
[AU PHOTO] NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the poet laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Native Guard, her third collection of poetry, received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
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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.
