"Layering joy and urgent defiance -- against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone -- Natasha Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, her first retrospective volume, draws together verses that delineate the stories of working-class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in casta paintings, Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina. Through the collection, inlaid and inextricable, winds the poet's own family history of upheaval and loss, resilience and love... As a whole, Monument casts new light on the trauma of our national wounds, our shared history. This is a poet's remarkable labor to source evidence, persistence, and strength from the past in order to change the very vocabulary we use to speak about race, gender, and our collective future"--