Natasha Trethewey: Finding Her Calling in a Wound That Never Heals
November 6, 2018 started as a rainy day in Delaware. The crisp morning chill of fall clung to the air as I drove to the polls. The entire day, I was waiting for 5 p.m., but not in the way I usually am after a long day of work. I was waiting for the chance to speak to Natasha Trethewey—775 miles away in Chicago—on Monument: Poems New and Selected’s publication date.
Trethewey—two-time US Poet Laureate, former Mississippi Poet Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner—has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, among others. She taught at Emory University in Atlanta for quite some time, and is now the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Her newest collection, Monument: Poems New and Selected, features work from four previous full-length collections—Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), and Thrall (2012)—in addition to two chapbooks, Congregation (2014) and Articulation, which makes its debut in Monument. Nearly twenty years‘ worth of work is represented in this deftly woven volume, addressing race, identity, the American South, the working class, black Civil War soldiers, Hurricane Katrina, and American history, as well as personal and familial history. Monument is both expansive and intimate as it seamlessly navigates this breadth of topics.
In this moment, in which conversations about male violence and misconduct, Confederate monuments, and the horrors on which this country was founded have taken center stage in public consciousness, the twenty years’ worth of poetry presented in Monument feels incredibly timely. While the collection grapples with these larger cultural conversations, it is also a monument to the loss of Trethewey’s mother thirty-three years ago. Unflinchingly, the collection is framed by how her mother’s murder by the hands of Trethewey’s ex-stepfather has framed her life.
The collection opens with “Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath,” which ends with a quote “learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: / that one does not bury the mother’s body / in the ground but in the chest, or—like you— / you carry her corpse on your back.” And it closes with “Articulation,” which is modeled after Miguel Cabrera’s Saint Gertrude (Santa Gertrudis). This poem looks at how the saint “is called to write / after seeing, in a vision, the sacred heart of Christ.” Likening her experience to such a vision, Trethewey
