Thrall - ISBNLookup.com

The Washington Post

…a must-read collection that equals the power and quality of her third book, Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize…Thrall is a powerful, beautifully crafted book, and Trethewey does a wonderful job of shifting from a personal perspective to a global view and back. She subtly challenges readers to confront their own attitudes about race, which so often go unexpressed and unexamined.
—Elizabeth Lund

Publishers Weekly

Trethewey made headlines and signaled a generational shift with her appointment this year as U.S. poet laureate. Already known for her 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard and for her articulate, deftly shaped, and sometimes research-driven poems about history and race, Trethewey in this fourth collection takes her familiar powers to non–U.S. turf, considering race, embodiment, guilt and liberation in paintings from Spain and Mexico. In one of the famous casta paintings illustrating Spanish colonial notions of race, a mulatto boy "is a palimpsest of paint—/ layers of color, history rendering him// that precise shade of in-between." Lightly rhymed pentameters about Diego Velázquez's painting "Kitchen Maid" pay homage to the scrutinized character: "she is the mortar/ and the pestle and rest in the mortar—still angled/ in its posture of use"; the patient title poem considers Juan de Pareja, a painter who started life as Velázquez's slave. When Trethewey turns her attention back to contemporary America, she looks at her own family: her late African-American mother and her white father, his life "showing me// how one life is bound to another, that hardship/ endures." Trethewey's ideas are not always original, but her searching treatments of her own family, and of people in paintings, show strength and care, and a sharp sense of line. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

"Utterly elegant." —Elle Magazine

Library Journal

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize (for Native Ground) and current U.S. poet laureate, Trethewey again places racial identity at the conceptual center of her finely crafted verse, in particular the depiction of mixed-race peoples as filtered through the lens of her own biracial heritage and the passing of her father, from whom she had long been estranged ("a history that links us—white, father, black daughter/—even as it renders us other to each other"). A number of ekphrastic poems deconstruct centuries-old artworks—"miracle transplant" paintings in which black donors sacrifice limbs for white recipients ("a body in service, plundered"), the Casta paintings of colonial Mexico, even a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, "rendered two-toned…as if the artist meant to contrast/his bright knowledge, its dark subtext"—as Trethewey's acute understanding of how "the past holds us captive" leads to insightful and often moving interactions between public and private histories. VERDICT Though several elegies for her father are unremarkable, the lion's share of Thrall conveys a wise and revelatory urgency appropriate to one of the vital social concerns of our time. Recommended for most collections.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca NY