IN METALLURGY, the word resilience describes a material’s ability to withstand fire, to be set loose by heat and, when cooled, recover its form. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey—a former two-term U.S. poet laureate and a professor at Northwestern University—is the definition of such resilience. In seven volumes of poetry and prose, including Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, forthcoming from Ecco in July, she has reckoned with traumas, both personal and cultural. In each work, Trethewey goes beyond witnessing to seek truth in all its complexity, forging her language in the hungry furnace of grief.
Trethewey was born in 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and grew up there, in Atlanta, and in New Orleans, the biracial daughter of poet and professor Eric Trethewey, a Canadian emigrant, and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker. The two met at Kentucky State College and crossed the border to marry in Ohio, where interracial couples could legally wed. Her parents divorced when she was six, and Trethewey moved to Atlanta with her mother, who later married Joel Grimmette, an erratic and violent Vietnam War veteran. The family, including Trethewey’s younger half-brother, also named Joel, was subjected to years of psychological, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Fearing for her and her family’s safety, Turnbough eventually divorced Grimmette; a year later Grimmette shot and killed her. Trethewey was just nineteen, at the end of her freshman year at the University of Georgia in Athens, when her mother was murdered.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
