RaveChapter 16Trethewey delves into memory like never before in this book and allows us to witness her resurfacing ... she weaves this long memorialized regional pain seamlessly into her personal history ... Poetry fans will notice many of their Trethewey favorites unfold on these prose pages ... Her poems become almost like delightful Easter eggs in the first part of the book ... Memorial Drive gives us a tender entry into the process of saving what remains—tender in the way a wound feels raw and untouchable, but Trethewey lets us touch it with her. Tender in the way a potter holds wet clay in her hands to build a vase, knowing how fragile the clay has to get before it can hold something beautiful ... We will never touch the physical body of her mother, but Trethewey gives us her stone feet, stuck too long in a violent marriage. We don’t get her breath, but we gasp and exhale with her in the letters, postcards, telephone transcripts and notes from her yellow legal pad. Behind the stone breasts Trethewey erects for her, we feel a thrumming heart through her daughter’s willingness to un-forget.
