The delicate branches of her verse run you along a … Her mother was murdered by her stepfather when she was seventeen years old, but Trethewey struggled to directly address the issue in her poetry until she began her work on Native Guard. Monument by Natasha Trethewey: a poetry collection consisting of serious stories of a mixed-race prostitute, historical struggles of people of colour, about hurricane Katrina, the poet's own family stories of loss. "The Mississippi-born poet Natasha Trethewey has an exalted résumé...but her poems are earthy; they fly close to the ground...Trethewey pivots knowingly, in her poetry, between hard times and good ones. In Natasha Trethewey Her fifth collection, Monument, was published in 2018. Still, the writing doesn't pull me in as a reader, there's not a lot of emotion here. In addition to her well-received poetry, Tretheway wrote a work of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), in response to the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The first poem I will analyze through this lens is “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey’s fourteen-line recollection of her mother’s funeral. Monument, Trethewey's first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates 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 Katrina.