Domestic Work: Poems
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In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone. Winner of the 1999 Cave Canem Prize, selected by Rita Dove.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey is the recipient of the Grolier Poetry Prize and her poems have been widely published. A member of the Dark Room Collective, she currently teaches at Auburn University. This is her first book.Publishers WeeklyWith poems based on photographs of African-Americans at work in the pre-civil rights era 20th-century America (not included), Trethewey's fine first collection functions as near-social documentary. In tableaux like "These Photographs" and "Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941," Trethewey evenly takes up the difficult task of preserving, and sometimes speculating upon, the people and conditions of the mostly Southern, mostly black working class. The sonnets, triplets and flush-left free verse she employs give the work an understated distance, and Trethewey's relatively spare language allows the characters, from factory and dock workers to homemakers, to take on fluid, present-tense movement: "Her lips tighten speaking/ of quitting time when/ the colored women filed out slowly/ to have their purses checked,/ the insides laid open and exposed/ by the boss's hand" ("Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956"). When Trethewey, a member of the Dark Room Collective (a group of young African-American writers including Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kevin Young and Janice Lowe), turns midway through the book to matters of family and autobiography, the book loses some momentum. But when the speaker comments on the actions of others, as in "At the Station," the poems correspondingly deepen: "Come back. She won't. Each/ glowing light dims/ the farther it moves from reach,// the train pulling clean/ out of the station. The woman sits/ facing where she's been.// She's chosen her place with care--/ each window another eye, another/ way of seeing what's back there." Trethewey's work follows in the wake of history and memory, tracing their combined effect on her speaker and subjects, and working to recover and preserve vitally local histories. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\|
IntroductionGesture of a Woman-in-Process3At the Owl Club, North Gulfport, Mississippi, 19504Three Photographs6Domestic Work, 193713Speculation, 193914Secular15Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 194116Expectant17Tableau18At the Station19Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 194520Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 195621His Hands22Self-Employment, 197023Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky27Cameo28Hot Combs29Family Portrait30Mythmaker31Amateur Fighter33Flounder35White Lies37Microscope38Saturday Matinee40History Lesson45Saturday Drive46Accounting47Gathering48Give and Take50Housekeeping52Picture Gallery53Collection Day54Carpenter Bee56Limen58
