Monument: Poems New and Selected

By Natasha Trethewey

Urgent new poems on race and gender inequality, and select poems drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, from two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey.

Layering joy and urgent defiance—against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone—Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s 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 poet’s 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 poet’s 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

“[Trethewey’s poems] dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.” —James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781328508690

Natasha Trethewey

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.

Book preview

title page

Contents

---

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath

Domestic Work

Limen

Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky

Family Portrait

Flounder

White Lies

Gathering

Picture Gallery

Domestic Work

1. Domestic Work, 1937

2. Speculation, 1939

3. Secular

4. Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941

5. Expectant

6. Tableau

7. At the Station

8. Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945

9. Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956

10. His Hands

11. Self-Employment, 1970

Gesture of a Woman in Process

Bellocq’s Ophelia

Bellocq’s Ophelia

Letter Home

Countess P—’s Advice for New Girls

Storyville Diary

Native Guard

Theories of Time and Space

I

The Southern Crescent

Genus Narcissus

Graveyard Blues

What the Body Can Say

Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971

What Is Evidence

Letter

After Your Death

Myth

At Dusk

II

Pilgrimage

Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi

1. King Cotton, 1907

2. Glyph, Aberdeen, 1913

3. Flood

4. You Are Late

Native Guard

Again, the Fields

III

Pastoral

Miscegenation

My Mother Dreams Another Country

Southern History

Blond

Southern Gothic

Incident

Providence

Monument

Elegy for the Native Guards

South

Congregation

Invocation, 1926

Congregation

1. Witness

2. Watcher

3. Believer

4. Kin

5. Exegesis

6. Prodigal

7. Benediction

Liturgy

Thrall

Illumination

Knowledge

Miracle of the Black Leg

The Americans

Taxonomy

Thrall

Calling

Bird in the House

Torna Atrás

Enlightenment

Elegy

Articulation

Repentance

My Father as Cartographer

Duty

Reach

Waterborne

Shooting Wild

Letter to Inmate #271847, Convicted of Murder, 1985

Meditation at Decatur Square

Transfiguration

Articulation

Notes

Acknowledgments

Read More from Natasha Trethewey

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2019

Copyright © 2018 by Natasha Trethewey

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trethewey, Natasha D., 1966– author.

Title: Monument : poems : new and selected / Natasha Trethewey.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012255 (print) | LCCN 2018016439 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328508690 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328507846 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358118237 (paperback)

Classification: LCC PS3570.R433 (ebook) | LCC PS3570.R433 A6 2018 (print) |

DDC 811/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012255

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Cover photograph © Vincent Ruddy

Author photograph © Matt Valentine

v4.1019

Invocation, 1926 by Natasha Trethewey, and Congregation and Liturgy from Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey, copyright © 2010 by Natasha Trethewey, reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.

Bellocq’s Ophelia, Letter Home, Countess P—’s Advice for New Girls, and Storyville Diary copyright © 2002 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted from Bellocq’s Ophelia with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Limen, Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky, Family Portrait, Flounder, White Lies, Gathering, Picture Gallery, Domestic Work, 1937, Speculation, 1939, Secular, Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941, Expectant, Tableau, At the Station, Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945, Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956, His Hands, Self-Employment, 1970, and Gesture of a Woman-in-Process copyright © 2000 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted from Domestic Work with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Excerpt from Meditation on Form and Measure from Black Zodiac by Charles Wright. Copyright © 1997 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

For my parents—

Gwen and Rick

and

for Brett

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds . . .

—from The Great City, Walt Whitman

Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath

Do not hang your head or clench your fists

when even your friend, after hearing the story,

says, My mother would never put up with that.

Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,

more often, a woman who chooses to leave

is then murdered. The hundredth time

your father says, But she hated violence,

why would she marry a guy like that?—

don’t waste your breath explaining, again,

how abusers wait, are patient, that they

don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes

not even the first few years of a marriage.

Keep an impassive face whenever you hear

Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage

when you recall those words were advice

given your mother. Try to forget the first

trial, before she was dead, when the charge

was only attempted murder; don’t belabor

the thinking or the sentence that allowed

her ex-husband’s release a year later, or

the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue—

they should work it out themselves. Just

breathe when, after you read your poems

about grief, a woman asks, Do you think

your mother was weak for men? Learn

to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-

cloud above your head, dark and heavy

with the words you cannot say; let silence

rain down. Remember you were told,

by your famous professor, that you should

write about something else, unburden

yourself of the death of your mother and

just pour your heart out in the poems.

Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that

reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and

contend with what it means, the folk saying

you 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.

I

from

Domestic Work

Limen

All day I’ve listened to the industry

of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree

just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker

to the cluttered house of memory in which

I can almost see my mother’s face.

She is there, again, beyond the tree,

its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,

hanging wet sheets on the line—each one

a thin white screen between us. So insistent

is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be

looking for something else—not simply

the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift

the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,

tireless, making the green hearts flutter.

Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky

It is 1965. I am not yet born, only

a fullness beneath the Empire waist

of my mother’s blue dress.

The ruffles at her neck are waves

of

Reviews for Monument

[bell7_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am getting a head start on reading for National Poetry Month with this retrospective volume of Natasha Trethewey's poetry. She is one of my favorite poets, and I don't say that lightly, because I find most poetry makes the simple hard to understand merely by being in verse. Trethewey's poetry is not at all like that. Whether she's reflecting on history as in "Native Guard," delving into her personal history as in "Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky" or delving into artwork in one of her ekphrastic poems, she has a way of choosing just the right word of phrase to say precisely what she means in a way the reader understands, and occasionally taking one's breath away. Though I've read three of her collections so only some of the poems were truly new to me, they were nonetheless fresh and I occasionally had to reread a couple of times to just to let it fully sink in. A phenomenal collection I highly recommend to anyone.

[detailmuse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’m new to poet-laureate Natasha Trethewey’s work and was captured from the moment of the first poem in this omnibus. These are vignette-ish narratives, with close-in perspectives of people of color, past and recent -- their traumas and histories and grief and resilience -- including Trethewey herself, particularly as regards her white father and her mother’s death at the hands of an ex-husband.My typical practice with collections of short works is to note in the table of contents the entries that especially resonate. I managed to do so with that first poem ... and then was repeatedly surprised to find I’d become so immersed in a series of poems that I’d forgotten to pause and note them.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)