Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey's new and selected poems, drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, while also including new work written over the last decade. With singular craft, Natasha Trethewey's poems respond to the trauma of our national wounds and our shared racial history. Urgent, defiant - against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy both intangible or graven in stone - Trethewey gives pedestal and voice to unsung icons. Here is verse delineating working-class African Americans, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first all-black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in Casta paintings, Gulf coast victims of Katrina. Through it all, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of trauma and loss, resilience and love. For the first time, this collection brings together poems from Trethewey's entire "opus of classics both elegant and necessary,"* a poet's remarkable labour to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to reinstate the stories and names we must use to inform the future. *Academy of American Poets' chancellor Marilyn Nelson AUTHOR: Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006)-for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-and, most recently, Thrall (2012). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the Board of Trustees Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She lives in Illinois.