Native Guard

I don't read a lot of poetry, but this book had come to my attention and I'm glad it did. The cover features a document where the writer, having finished filling the paper in one direction, rotated it 90 degrees and kept writing. Any historian knows this is devilishly difficult to interpret. Trethewey skillfully uses this concept in the title poem at the center of a book, where a Black solider fighting for the Union in the Civil War uses a journal found in an abandoned Confederate home as his own: "even this journal, near full / with someone else's words, overlapped now, / crosshatched beneath mine. On every page, / his story intersecting with my own." The journal becomes the literal representation of the different stories playing out on the Southern landscape.

Trethewey's poems cover a range of topics and use a variety of techniques, and she writes sharply about her own experience growing up in Mississippi as a child of a white father and Black mother, as well as the discrimination that her own parents faced. As the poems move through time but remain rooted in place, they are a searing look at a family's experience and the broader national story. Wholeheartedly recommended.