Speaker
Trethewey's poems commonly feature a first-person speaker. Often, this individual is clearly Trethewey writing as herself. Her voice is often reflective, exploring her personal history with precise word choice and imagery. These qualities appear prominently in "History Lesson," where she studies an old photograph from her childhood. She writes, "I am four in this photograph, standing / on a wide strip of Mississippi beach, / my hands on the flowered hips / of a bright bikini. My toes dig in, / curl around wet sand. The sun cuts / the rippling Gulf in flashes with each / tidal rush." Writing from this perspective, she saturates the poem with the details of the picture and her memory, vividly recalling the feeling of the sand and the glint of the sun on the water. She then goes on to note that this picture was taken "two years after they opened / the rest of this beach to us." In making this historical note, she effectively contrasts the harsh reality of segregation with her childhood wonder about the beach. Trethewey's personal works often mix these two registers, showing how her own life was inevitably shaped by political power and racial prejudice.
In other poems, Trethewey uses figures from history as speakers in her works. In these instances, she unpacks the personal lives of these characters, as they relate to the period and location that she is writing about. In "," from Bellocq's Ophelia, Trethewey imagines the deep interiority of a prostitute working in New Orleans' red light district: "It troubles me to think that I am suited / for this work—spectacle and fetish— / a pale odalisque. But then I recall / my earliest training—childhood—how / my mother taught me to curtsy and be still / so that I might please a white man, my father." She captures the speaker's anxiety about being too compliant a subject for a photograph, showing how she was impacted by a childhood of being conditioned to avoid offending her white father. Trethewey's careful characterization of these individuals shows both her dedication to historical research as well as her desire to document stories of marginalized people. By capturing the impact of racism and oppression on such an intimate scale, she reveals how it profoundly shaped this woman's entire life.
Families
Trethewey will also sometimes utilize a plural voice, creating a chorus effect as it shows a community grappling with an issue or scene. In her poem "Incident," she depicts the fear of a Black family as they witness a Ku Klux Klan cross burning at night: "At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, / a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns. / We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, / the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil." The use of the pronoun "we" makes the emotional experience of this scene something shared. The fear implied by the word "trembling" is not specific to one person. This is particularly important to the poem, as it describes a story that is retold every year—one that is witnessed and remembered by a community, not an individual. As in her other poems, Trethewey includes strong images (the men in white gowns, the lantern wicks) in the stanza to underscore the emotional weight of the moment.
In a less disturbing context, the poem "Housekeeping" describes a family's efforts never to let broken objects go to waste, making small repairs as needed: "We work the magic / of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes." Similar to "Incident," the use of a plural pronoun here shows that these gestures of labor and care are not the work of one individual, but instead are part of a group effort. She is showing the daily work that is done by the women in the household, demonstrating its importance and difficulty as she describes the specificity of these fixes. By not framing this from the perspective of a single individual, Trethewey is able to paint the efforts of families and communities, while also presenting habitual actions.
Father
Another prominent figure in Trethewey's poetry is her father. As the child of an interracial couple, Trethewey often looks at the role her white father played in her life and where their points of view sometimes diverged. This subject is an essential part of the poem "Enlightenment," when a visit to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, reignites an ongoing debate between them. She describes the conversation: "For years we debated the distance between / word and deed. I'd follow my father from book / to book, gathering citations, listening / as he named — like a field guide to Virginia — / each flower and tree and bird as if to prove / a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater / than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision." For Trethewey, Jefferson's personal failures—owning slaves, not acknowledging the children he had with Sally Hemmings—outweigh his intellectual and political feats. Her father, on the other hand, seeks to excuse his behavior to preserve the value of his legacy. The poem uses this conversation to reveal the ways in which Trethewey was both close to her father and distant from him, and how the racial divide informed their different perspectives on history.
Native Guard
In "Native Guard," Trethewey writes from the perspective of a member of the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first Black regiments to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. The poem takes the form of a sequence of sonnets, structured with dated journal entry headings. This very specific historical perspective gives Trethewey the ability to write about historical events (like the massacre at Fort Pillow, or the abandoned soldiers at Port Hudson) that might otherwise be overlooked. In addition, her use of a long timespan lets her show his gradual disillusionment with the Union cause. This is particularly apparent in the last stanza of the poem: "Beneath battlefields, green again, / the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone / we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told." These lines show the Guard member's despair over the wasted lives of his fellow Black soldiers, while also revealing his purpose for recounting these events. He, like Trethewey, wants to preserve these marginalized stories. Trethewey uses characters like this narrator to amplify historical voices that might be otherwise forgotten.
