Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Thrall: Poems
    Thrall: Poems
    Thrall: Poems
    Ebook74 pages26 minutes

    Thrall: Poems

    By Natasha Trethewey

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 28, 2012
    ISBN9780547840420
    Thrall: Poems
    Author

    Natasha Trethewey

    NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 2012–14. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Thrall, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

    Read more from Natasha Trethewey

    Related to Thrall

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      loved best. Words I have neversaid. New sentence, at 80. Of coursenot more than his children, and their children. That goeswithout saying—but I want to lay down eachelement of love’s house. First,the hole, under—apple cellar, potato cellar,cellar to

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      I’ve seen enough films where a character nickshimself shaving or maybe has a bread knife slip and the thinrun of blood is supposed to stand for some violence,for something he did and is desperateto cover up, but the truth will out—I’ve seen enough th

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Some Of The Men We Love Are Terrorists

      Jan 1, 2022

      & honestly, i have no solutions—our world a mad swarm of bees. forgive me my own devotion, the handsome clench. my first love masters a sinister arithmetic; his patrilineage swelling like a heavy god between his legs. i’m well-conditioned, my hands a

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Isabella Hammad

      Dec 5, 2019

      This year felt like a year in which I read poorly. Or at least my reading felt inconsistent, and punctuated by long passages in which I was unable to read at all. But now that I have drawn up a list, I seem to have read exactly 50 books, which isn’t

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From Our Archives: A 1981 Interview With Toni Morrison

      Aug 7, 2019

      The award-winning author Toni Morrison died Aug. 5, 2019. We're reposting this 1981 interview conducted shortly after her fourth novel, "Tar Baby," was published.

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List

      Jun 8, 2020

      These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America. The post An Anti-Racist Poetry Reading List appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Resistance and Reclamation

      Oct 13, 2021

      IN LATE 2016, adoptee poet and Kundiman fellow Leah Silvieus initiated a research project about the ways in which emerging adoptee poets contend with identity, loss, culture, and family in their work. She sent a query through the Kundiman network, lo

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Zinzi Clemmons

      Jun 14, 2017

      by Viking. Danzy Senna author of five books, including the novel New People, forthcoming in August from Riverhead Books. I HAD the pleasure of reading a section of What We Lose several summers ago, when I was Zinzi Clemmons’s workshop leader at the B

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bookshelf

      Aug 3, 2020

      Bookshelf
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rot

      Sep 2, 2022

      Rot
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bless Your Soup

      Jan 1, 2022

      I am doing the work of healing.As in:I cry to early-2000s Paula DeAnda.I wash the towels from our apartment.I find your resume onlineand critique it harshly for a ghost audience. I come up with new names for emotions, likeDISLODGED FITTED SHEET orDAM

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Thrall

    4.5/5

    33 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The only other book of poetry I've read by Natasha Trethewey was Native Guard, which I loved. Thrall was good but didn't hold up to that same standard for me. These poems all address the complicatedness of mixed race, whether by exploring classic paintings and art or Trethewey's own (or perhaps her narrator's, I know that's often different in poetry though these felt very personal) relationship with her white father. The ones on art were particularly challenging because the artwork was not included. The final poem, "The Illumination," was my favorite.

    Book preview

    Thrall - Natasha Trethewey

    title page

    Contents

    Title Page

    Contents

    Copyright

    Dedication

    Epigraph

    Part I

    Elegy

    Part II

    Miracle of the Black Leg

    On Captivity

    Taxonomy

    Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata

    Knowledge

    Part III

    The Americans

    Mano Prieta

    De Español y Negra; Mulata

    Mythology

    Geography

    Torna Atrás

    Bird in the House

    Artifact

    Fouled

    Rotation

    Part IV

    Thrall

    Calling

    Enlightenment

    How the Past Comes Back

    On Happiness

    Vespertina Cognitio

    Illumination

    Notes

    Acknowledgments

    Read More from Natasha Trethewey

    About the Author

    Connect with HMH

    First Mariner Books edition 2015

    Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey

    All rights reserved

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

    www.hmhco.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Trethewey, Natasha D., date.

    Thrall : poems / Natasha Trethewey.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 978-0-547-57160-7 ISBN 978-0-544-58620-8 (pbk.)

    I. Title.

    PS3570.R433T47 2012

    811'.54—dc23

    2012017321

    Cover design by Martha Kennedy

    Cover art: Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo (detail), c. 1750, oil on canvas by Juan Rodriguez Juárez (1675–1728)

    Breamore House, Hampshire, UK/Bridgeman Images

    eISBN 978-0-547-84042-0

    v4.1118

    To my father

    What is love?

    One name for it is knowledge.

    —Robert Penn Warren

    After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

    —T. S. Eliot

    Elegy

    For my father

    I think by now the river must be thick

        with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

    as it was that morning: drizzle needling

        the surface, mist at the banks like a net

    settling around us—everything damp

        and shining. That morning, awkward

    and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

        into the current and found our places—

    you upstream a few yards and out

        far deeper. You must remember how

    the river seeped in over your boots

        and you grew heavier with that defeat.

    All day I kept turning to watch you, how

        first you mimed our guide’s casting

    then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

        between us; and

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1