The House of Being -- Natasha Trethewey, Hardcover

An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey

"Searching and intimate, this impresses."--Publishers Weekly

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.

In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit "so that my story would not be determined for me." She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother's collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

Author: Natasha Trethewey
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 04/09/2024
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.17h x 4.88w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9780300265927

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2024
Publishers Weekly 02/26/2024

About the Author
Natasha Trethewey is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She served two terms as the nineteenth poet laureate of the United States and is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard. Her most recent book is the bestselling memoir Memorial Drive. She lives in Evanston, IL.