num_pages: 208
description: Urgent new poems on race and gender inequality and select poems drawing upon Domestic Work Bellocqs Ophelia Native Guard Congregation and Thrall from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey.Layering joy and urgent defianceagainst physical and cultural erasure against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stoneTretheweys work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument  Tretheweys 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 poets 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 poets 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[Tretheweys poems] dig beneath the surface of historypersonal or communal from childhood or from a century agoto explore the human struggles that we all face. James H. Billington 13th Librarian of Congress
language: English
title: Monument: Poems New and Selected
publisher: Ecco