Native Guard: PoemsPosted in Autobiography, Books, History, Media Archive, Poetry, United States on 2012-09-02 23:41Z by Steven |
Mariner Books an Imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2007-04-03
64 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618872657; ISBN-10: 0618872655
Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.
Excerpt:
Miscegenation
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year – you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.