Native Guard: Poems

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.

Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South---where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.

The title of the collection refers to ...