Sign-In
Cart
Native Guard: Poems
Audio Book
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: HarperAudio
Published: Nov 11 2025
Language: English
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.
Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South----where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.
The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.
The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey's life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother's tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.
Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.
2 different editions
Also available
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback