Natasha Trethewey, Domestic Work: Poems, 2000

Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, author of "Bellocq's Ophelia" and "Domestic Work," has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize. Her work was also included in "The Best American Poetry 2000." Trethewey now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable verse--reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone. [Source]