Houghton Mifflin Harcourt states: “Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical – exploring her own interracial and complicated roots – and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history."