Harper Academic

Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition)

Poems

by Natasha Trethewey

On Sale: 08/28/2012

Price: $9.99

Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition)

Enlarge Book Cover

Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition)

Poems

by Natasha Trethewey

On Sale: 08/28/2012

Format:

Price: $9.99

About the Book

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Included in this audio-enhanced edition are recordings of the U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey reading Native Guard in its entirety, as well as an interview with the poet from the HMH podcast The Poetic Voice, in which she recounts what it was like to grow up in the South as the daughter of a white father and a black mother and describes other influences that inspired the work. Experience this Pulitzer Prize–winning collection in an engaging new way.

Growing up in the Deep South, Natasha Trethewey was never told that in her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units. Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the soldiers who served and whose voices have echoed through her own life.

The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, so Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

Critical Praise

"Elegiac...eloquently told...profoundly moving...Trethewey is clearly a poet to savor." --Maxine Kumin

"In a very few years Natasha Trethewey has created a small body of nearly flawless poetry." --Rodney Jones

"[Natasha Tretheway’s] voice is a rare, beautiful gift to the reader." --William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill

"Natasha Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thing—artistically fine Civil War poetry...She is our Native Guard." --David Madden, Louisiana State University, author of Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War -

Product Details

  • ISBN: 9780547526263
  • ISBN 10: 0547526261
  • Imprint: Ecco
  • On Sale: 08/28/2012
  • Pages: 64
  • List Price: $9.99
  • BISAC1 : POETRY / American / General
  • BISAC2 : POETRY / American / Asian American
  • BISAC3 : POETRY / Caribbean & Latin American