Thrall: Poems (Hardcover)

Author: Natasha Trethewey

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (2012)

In Thrall, Natasha Trethewey—Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Native Guard—examines her own interracial, complicated, and utterly American roots, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.