Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition): Poems

Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition): Poems

by Natasha Trethewey
Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition): Poems

Native Guard (enhanced Audio Edition): Poems

by Natasha Trethewey

eBookEnhanced (Enhanced)

$12.99 

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Overview


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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780547526263
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 08/28/2012
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 64
Sales rank: 99,367
File size: 61 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range: 14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

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