Monument: Poems New and Selected

With singular craft, Natasha Trethewey’s poems respond to the trauma of our national wounds and our shared racial history. Urgent, defiant—against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy both intangible or graven in stone—Trethewey gives pedestal and voice to unsung icons. Here is verse delineating working-class African Americans, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first all-black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through it all, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet’s own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love.
 
Long-listed for the National Book Award, this collection brings together poems from Trethewey’s entire “opus of classics both elegant and necessary,”* a poet’s remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to reinstate the stories and names we must use to inform the future.
*Academy of American Poets chancellor Marilyn Nelson

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.