Thrall; Poems

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Very good. Nancy Crampton (author photograph). [12], 84 Pages. Signed by the author on the title page. Linear impression across the top third of several early pages. Minor soiling on half-title page. DJ has Signed by the Author sticker on its front. Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Trethewey is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She previously served as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she taught from 2001 to 2017. Trethewey was elected in 2019 both to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Academy of American Poets Chancellor David St. John said Trethewey "is one of our formal masters, a poet of exquisite delicacy and poise who is always unveiling the racial and historical inequities of our country and the ongoing personal expense of these injustices. Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal experience felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound." Trethewey was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Trethewey's first published collection, Domestic Work (2000), was the inaugural recipient of the Cave Canem prize for a first book by an African American poet. The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard, by America's former Poet Laureate. 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. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Trethewey made headlines and signaled a generational shift with her appointment this year as U.S. poet laureate. Already known for her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard and for her articulate, deftly shaped, and sometimes research-driven poems about history and race, Trethewey in this fourth collection takes her familiar powers to non-U.S. turf, considering race, embodiment, guilt and liberation in paintings from Spain and Mexico. In one of the famous casta paintings illustrating Spanish colonial notions of race, a mulatto boy "is a palimpsest of paint, layers of color, history rendering him that precise shade of in-between." Lightly rhymed pentameters about Diego Velazquez's painting "Kitchen Maid" pay homage to the scrutinized character: "she is the mortar/ and the pestle and rest in the mortar, still angled/ in its posture of use"; the patient title poem considers Juan de Pareja, a painter who started life as Velazquez's slave. When Trethewey turns her attention back to contemporary America, she looks at her own family: her late African-American mother and her white father, his life "showing me// how one life is bound to another, that hardship/ endures." Trethewey's searching treatments of her own family, and of people in paintings, show strength and care, and a sharp sense of line.