Monuments of Word: The Poetic Resonance of Natasha Trethewey

Welcome to a journey into the lyrical, profound, and urgently necessary world of Natasha Trethewey, one of America's most essential contemporary voices. If you are a poet, a lover of language, or someone who seeks to understand the complex tapestry of American history, Trethewey's work is an absolute must-read.

Born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey's very existence was a defiance of the law. Her birth occurred on Confederate Memorial Day, exactly one hundred years after the holiday was established. She was born to a Black mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, and a white Canadian father, Eric Trethewey. Because interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi at the time, her parents had to cross state lines to marry in Ohio. This intersection of personal identity and national history forms the bedrock of her poetic innovation.

Trethewey's style is marked by a meticulous, crystalline control of form. Where some poets might use free verse to express trauma or historical outrage, Trethewey turns to the ghazal, the pantoum, the sonnet, and the elegy. By pouring chaotic, painful histories into strict poetic vessels, she achieves a simmering emotional restraint that makes her words all the more devastating. Her critical reception has been universally stellar. She served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014, and in a remarkable twist of fate, she served simultaneously as the Poet Laureate of her home state of Mississippi.

Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 collection, Native Guard, stands as a masterclass in weaving the deeply personal with the forgotten public record. In the book, she mourns her mother—who was tragically murdered by Trethewey's former stepfather when the poet was just nineteen—while also resurrecting the history of the Louisiana Native Guards. This was a regiment of Black Union soldiers stationed near her hometown during the Civil War, whose graves were lost to the sea and erased from local monuments.

To understand how she captures this duality, listen to the opening lines of her masterful ghazal, Miscegenation, quoted verbatim:

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.

Notice how the repetition of the word Mississippi acts as an anchor, tethering her origin story to the fraught landscape of the American South.

Trethewey is also deeply invested in the pantoum, a form that relies on repeating, interlocking lines, perfectly mirroring the cyclical nature of trauma and memory. In her poem Incident, she recounts the terrifying memory of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in her family's yard. Here is a verbatim excerpt from the poem's opening:

We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.

We peered from the windows, shade drawn,
at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green.
Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.

The chilling refrain, though nothing really happened, exposes the ways marginalized people are often forced to downplay their own terror to survive.

If you are new to Natasha Trethewey's work, I highly recommend starting with the poem Elegy for the Native Guards. Why this poem? Because it serves as a perfect keyhole into her broader project of combating historical erasure. In it, she visits a fort on Ship Island where the Daughters of the Confederacy have placed a plaque honoring Confederate soldiers, but left no mention of the Black Union men who fought and died there. The poem ends with a haunting reminder that the elements and God's deliberate eye are the only true witnesses. Reading it first will train your eye to look for the ghosts that Trethewey so brilliantly conjures—the people, like her mother and those soldiers, whom history tried to forget.

Beyond her Pulitzer, her life in poetry is filled with fascinating details. Her father, Eric, was also an acclaimed poet, and she studied under him while earning her Master of Arts at Hollins University. Later in her career, she published critically acclaimed ekphrastic poetry in her 2012 collection Thrall, using Enlightenment-era casta paintings to interrogate the lingering presence of racial hierarchies.

Natasha Trethewey does not just write poems; she builds monuments out of words. She proves that poetry can be a tool of profound historical correction. For poets and poetry lovers, her work is an invitation to look closely at the archives of our own lives, to name what has been lost, and to ensure that the charred grass is never simply forgotten just because it has turned green again.