Domestic Work

"With poems based on photographs of African-Americans at work in the pre-civil rights era 20th-century America, Trethewey's fine first collection functions as near-social documentary. . . The sonnets, triplets and flush-left free verse she employs give the work an understated distance, and Trethewey's relatively spare language allows the characters, from factory and dock workers to homemakers, to take on fluid, present-tense movement."—Publishers Weekly