The House of Being - Paperback

Name: The House of Being - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780300281798
Price: 14.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Natasha Trethewey

$14.00

Book Overview

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.

ISBN	9780300281798
Author	Natasha Trethewey
Publisher	Yale University Press
Genre	Biography and Literature
Format	Paperback
Published	April 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	96
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

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About Natasha Trethewey

NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 2012-14. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Thrall, Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

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The House of Being - Paperback