Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is one of the most striking and powerful poets to emerge in the 21st century. Her work has garnered numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes in 2007 and 2012. Monument: Poems New and Selected is a collection of Trethewey’s most celebrated and acclaimed works, along with a selection of new poems.

Monument celebrates the many layers of Trethewey’s poetic artistry, from intimate autobiography to careful consideration of racial and gendered dynamics in America. A large portion of the collection considers the Civil War, particularly her great-great grandfather’s experience as a Confederate soldier. In her poem “Southern History,” Trethewey longs to learn of the “hidden story” of her maternal lineage in the wake of the war. She takes readers to her family’s land in Mississippi, noting “My grandmother ploughed the quarter-acre / With mules. Her hands, raw to the bone, / Traced the furrows, made them her own / Buried with her in this potter’s ground.” Trethewey reflects on the long-lasting effects of the war on her family and people, invoking the analogy of a monument in “Theories of Time and Space.” She states, “I wanted to find the hidden cornerstone / on which our lives were built and try to read / the inscription- something entered in a ledger / no one thought to look: the despairs fledged / among us / the losses never mourned / the purposes of their lives unsworn.”

Throughout Monument, Trethewey confronts some of the most difficult issues of the human experience: loss, displacement, injustice and violence. In “Biloxi,” her examination of racial violence, Trethewey alludes to the history of her city, which is still haunted by the memory of lynchings and racial terror during the early 20th century, and to the sense of alienation that accompanies it: “But every time I return, I am an outsider / swallowed by the indifference / of a place I remember no longer remembers me.” The poem “Pilgrimage” reflects on the global refugee crisis, articulating the grief of those who have been forced to leave the homes they have known.

Trethewey’s work in Monument is often both personal and expansive. In “Song of the World Becoming New,” Trethewey imagines a new world, a “new Eden” without racism and hatred. In a prophetic voice, Trethewey declares, “I am the one who must gives birth / To a new way of the world / A world reborn of the rubble of the past / Humbled and hallowed and finally clean.”

Through her multifaceted narrative style, Trethewey illuminates the interconnectedness of experiences, both personal and unworldly. Monument: Poems New and Selected demonstrates Trethewey’s wide-ranging creative power as well as her unmatched ability to explore the many complexities of the human condition. This is an essential collection of Trethewey’s most thought-provoking and moving poems and one that readers of all kinds will benefit from.