Monument

Starred review from October 15, 2018
Two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Trethewey (Thrall) culls some of the finest work from her illustrious two-decade career and presents formally diverse new poems exploring her customary themes. She dredges family history both dark and luminous, reliving the trauma of her mother’s murder by her stepfather, reiterating the details as if the outcome might be different. The brilliant, evocative “Genus Narcissus” turns sinister as the poet recalls giving her mother daffodils as a child only to watch them wither and die on the windowsill: “Be taken with yourself,/ they said to me; Die early, to my mother.” Trethewey also evocatively imagines her grandmother in 1940s Mississippi, writing “She can fill a room// with a loud clear alto, broom-dance/ right out the back door, her heavy footsteps// a parade beneath the stars.” The ekphrastic series “Bellocq’s Ophelia” voices a mixed-race prostitute from a famous 1912 photograph by E.J Bellocq as she sits for her portrait: “I try to recall what I was thinking—/ how not to be exposed, though naked, how/ to wear skin like a garment, seamless.” Trethewey’s arresting images, urgent tone, and surgically precise language meld with exacting use of rhyme and anaphora create an intensity that propels the poems forward. This collection is ideal for new readers seeking a representative sample of Trethewey’s best work.

Starred review from November 1, 2018
Trethewey's genius for dovetailing the personal and the communal, the impressionistic and the factual, was evident from the start, and her first book of poems, Domestic Work (2000), kicks off this magnificent new and selected collection. A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Heinz Award, scholar and poet Trethewey mines documents, scrutinizes paintings and photographs, and transforms concrete objects into engines of emotion and memories as she excavates her southern home ground and illuminates the lives of African Americans, especially women. Here are breathtaking persona poems depicting New Orleans' Storyville from Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), exploring the shocking fate of the first black Union army regiment in Native Guard?(2006), and offering tribute to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in Congregation (2014). Biracialism is a root theme for Trethewey. It is the heart of Thrall ? (2012) and propels the 10 exquisitely mournful yet determined new poems. For all the tragic, overlooked history Trethewey reclaims with clarion lyricism, it is her own family complexities and terrible loss that reverberate most. Monument is an essential volume of piercing wit, elegiac beauty, profound insights intimate and cultural, and the sustaining power of remembrance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)