Thrall
(2012, Houghton Mifflin)
Goodreads Choice Awards 2012 Finalist, Best Poetry
Finalist, 2013 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award
Finalist, 2013 Paterson Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2013 Phillis Wheatley Book Award, Poetry
“A powerful, beautifully crafted book.”—The Washington Post
Charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces that determine the roles to which a mixed-race daughter and her white father are consigned. In a brilliant series of poems about the taxonomies of mixed unions, Natasha Trethewey creates a fluent and vivid backdrop to her own familial predicament. While tropes about captivity, bondage, knowledge, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey unflinchingly examines our shared past by reflecting on her history of small estrangements and by confronting the complexities of race and the deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference in America.
Reviews and Praise:
“Trethewey’s is a book of history, both personal and public, its beauty is as ravishing and pointed as the scalpel that appears several times — showing us literal, racialized dissection. By exploring colonial ‘casta’ paintings, ‘the treachery of nostalgia,’ and Thomas Jefferson’s architectural feats and racial fiascos, Trethewey links us all through the body and memory. Wielding her pen like that same scalpel, the poet seeks to mend what’s missing “in a story that’s still being written.’”—Kevin Young, NPR.org
“Ripe with the perfidies and paradoxes of thralldom both personal and public, it is utterly elegant.”—Elle
“Bold, beautifully crafted poetry. . . . Trethewey’s poems are inextricably linked with her personal history. They explore attitudes toward race by looking at artistic works from the U.S. and Europe, some dating back to the 1400s. But in Trethewey’s vision, they are made strikingly contemporary. . . . This slim volume is filled with such vivid, gorgeously crafted imagery. Along with ruminations on actual portraits on canvas, Trethewey offers a vivid portrait of bits of her life.”—The Aspen Times
“[Trethewey’s] choices and distance are masterful. She employs no direct righteous indignation, lectures, blame, or self-pitying. Not here. Instead we are given art, like Williams, Hurston, and Villanueva before her, that shows us a specific situation, how difficult finding and maintaining one’s identity in a malicious environment can be. What is amazing about Trethewey’s poetry is not that her poetic project remains always focused on the struggle for identity. What is amazing is how she somehow manages to keep the poetry interesting and impactful. American poetry is incredibly lucky to have her.”—The Rumpus
“Trethewey again places racial identity at the conceptual center of her finely crafted verse, in particular the depiction of mixed-race peoples as filtered through the lens of her own biracial heritage and the passing of her father, from whom she had long been estranged . . . Trethewey’s acute understanding of how ‘the past holds us captive’ leads to insightful and often moving interactions between public and private histories . . . Thrall conveys a wise and revelatory urgency appropriate to one of the vital social concerns of our time.”—Library Journal
“In poems that again exhibit her gift for finding in microcosmic form the specter of societal relations, Trethewey makes explicit historically ignored ideas that underlie (a very literal) enlightenment.”—Booklist
“[Trethewey’s] searching treatments of her own family, and of people in paintings, show strength and care, and a sharp sense of line.”—Publishers Weekly
“Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall is simply the finest work of her already distinguished career . . . Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal histories felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound.”—David St. John, author of The Face: A Novella in Verse
“A voice that not only expands the position of [poetry], but helps us better understand ourselves. Her poems tell stories of loss and reckoning, both personal and historical.”—Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress
“In poems of exquisite tact and clarity, Natasha Trethewey confronts the excruciating differentials of racial mapping and the will-to-knowledge such mapping represents. Through the serial shocks of historical and personal discovery, through meticulous inventories of human division and turnings-aside, above all through “the dark amendment” of acknowledged bonds—the ‘Thrall’ of her title—these poems probe the very foundations of reciprocal understanding.”—Linda Gregerson
Format: Paperback, Hardcover, eBook