Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The House of Being

The House of Being

Trethewey, Natasha

Hardcover

Series: Why I Write

Biographies GeneralLiterary CriticismPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 0300265921
ISBN13: 9780300265927
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Apr 9 2024
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.71 Width: 4.88 Depth: 7.17
Language: English
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

Trethewey doesn't just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories.--Shannon Carlin, Time

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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Trethewey, Natasha

View All

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All