Domestic Work: Poems

Winner of the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award

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.