Domestic Work [Paperback]

Natasha Trethewey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2000

In this debut collection, 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 reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With poems based on photographs of African-Americans at work in the pre-civil rights era 20th-century America (not included), Trethewey's fine first collection functions as near-social documentary. In tableaux like "These Photographs" and "Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941," Trethewey evenly takes up the difficult task of preserving, and sometimes speculating upon, the people and conditions of the mostly Southern, mostly black working class. The sonnets, triplets and flush-left free verse she employs give the work an understated distance, and Trethewey's relatively spare language allows the characters, from factory and dock workers to homemakers, to take on fluid, present-tense movement: "Her lips tighten speaking/ of quitting time when/ the colored women filed out slowly/ to have their purses checked,/ the insides laid open and exposed/ by the boss's hand" ("Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956"). When Trethewey, a member of the Dark Room Collective (a group of young African-American writers including Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kevin Young and Janice Lowe), turns midway through the book to matters of family and autobiography, the book loses some momentum. But when the speaker comments on the actions of others, as in "At the Station," the poems correspondingly deepen: "Come back. She won't. Each/ glowing light dims/ the farther it moves from reach,// the train pulling clean/ out of the station. The woman sits/ facing where she's been.// She's chosen her place with careA/ each window another eye, another/ way of seeing what's back there." Trethewey's work follows in the wake of history and memory, tracing their combined effect on her speaker and subjects, and working to recover and preserve vitally local histories. (Sept.)
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From Kirkus Reviews

Trethewey's verse explores the various forms of labor-from the men on the docks to the women employed as domestics. Of a photograph of washerwomen taken by Clifton Johnson in 1902, Trethewey writes: "But in this photograph, / women do not smile, / their lips a steady line / connecting each quiet face. / They walk the road toward home, / a week's worth of take-in laundry / balanced on their heads / lightly as church hats. Shaded / by their loads, they do not squint, / their ready gaze through him, / to me, straight ahead." Her remembrances of her own family are touching. In "Cameo," she recalls peering out from her bed as a child to watch her mother dress by the light of an oil lamp and in "Hot Combs" how the heat in the kitchen made her mother "glow" when she pulled combs from the fire to dress her hair, "her face made strangely beautiful / as only suffering can do." Her father, who loved reading and scholarship and had "gentle hands," had been an amateur boxer who first took up the sport while still a boy and later "turned that anger into a prize." From him she learned that "living meant suffering, loss" and that "really living meant taking risks" ("Amateur Fighter"). The plain language and surface simplicity of these poems is deceptive. Their insights into the history and experience of black Americans contain a profound message for all of us.A noteworthy debut by a remarkable young poet -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (September 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555973094
• ISBN-13: 978-1555973094
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #480,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Natasha Trethewey is the author of two previously published collections, Belloq's Ophelia and Domestic Work. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, she was the recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Grolier Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a rare and marvelous work, January 6, 2001

By 

Mary Carol Moran (Tallassee, AL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Domestic Work (Paperback)

Domestic Work is that rare creation, a collection that will appeal to non-poets as well as to the most dedicated student of poetry. That's because Trethewey uses her translucent talent to create poems that are clear, poems that say something interesting, poems that stay with you. If you've never thought you would want to read a book of poetry, start here. If you've worked on your poetry craft for years and want to savor a master poet, buy this book. If you want to experience first-hand the special joy and pain of being mixed race, Trethewey will lead you to understand. Any poetry collection that doesn't include Domestic Work isn't complete.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Calling One Home to Domestic Work, August 23, 2000

By 

"m_rughes" ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Domestic Work (Paperback)

"Domestic Work," by Natasha Trethewey, is the essence of well-crafted poetry. Each poem, of "Domestic Work," maintains delicate balances of "literal" meaning as well as "aesthetic" or "thematic" meaning. The thoughtful word choices, in Trethewey's work, depict vivid backdrops of sights, smells, textures and sounds. The well-chosen adjectives do not 'crowd' or distract from the themes -- both literal and aesthetic. With various foci and themes, the poems of "Domestic Work" truly beckon the reader to perform internal "domestic work" -- mentally, spiritually and emotionally.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The debut collection of her poetry, June 5, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Domestic Work (Paperback)

Natasha Trethewey has won the Grolier Poetry Prize and her individual pieces have been widely published in a variety of places. Domestic Work is the debut collection of her poetry and will well serve to introduce her work to a whole new audience of appreciative readers. Housekeeping: We mourn the broken things, chair legs/wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,/the threadbare clothes. We work the magic/of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes./We save what we can, melt small pieces/of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones/for sou. Beating rugs against the house,/we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading/across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw/the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs/out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie./I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,/listen for passing cars. All day we watch/for the mail, some news from a distant place.