America's New Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey, originally of Mississippi and now at Emory University in Atlanta, is America's nineteenth poet laureate, and the first Southerner to hold the post since the original.

What kind of writer would you have become if you had been born outside the South?

I have no idea. I can’t begin to imagine myself without the fate of my geography. I feel lucky to have been born into a troubled and violent history and a terrible beauty.

Here is the poem cited in the first part of the review. You can see her annoyance at the refusal to see the South she loves -- which is, in a way, different from the one that I do. Yet we are both of the thing, of the place.