Thrall: Poems
When Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced Trethewey’s appointment as the 2012–13 U.S. Poet Laureate, he drew attention to the way her poems “dig beneath the surface of history,” both national and familial. In Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard (2006), this historical excavation takes the form of a figurative uprooting of Southern Agrarian poets, like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, while honoring her own maternal heritage. In Thrall, Trethewey examines the conflicting feelings of resentment and gratitude a biracial woman harbors toward her white father. 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. By focusing on the artistically talented slave of the painter Diego Velázquez, rather than the famous master, or by unpacking the strange taxonomies of skin tone in colonial Mexico, Trethewey continues important work toward internalizing and making tangible for today’s readers large swaths of racial legacy. This latest collection appears just as Trethewey begins her tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate. --Diego Báez