RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMemorial Drive is, among so many other wondrous things, an exploration of a Black mother and daughter trying to get free in a land that conflates survival with freedom and womanhood with girlhood ... A book that makes a reader feel as much as Memorial Drive does cannot be written without an absolute mastery of varied modes of discourse ... In one of the book’s most devastating and artful chapters, Trethewey makes an unexpected but wholly necessary switch to the second person ... What happens in most riveting literature is seldom located solely in plot. I’ve not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language than Memorial Drive ... Memorial Drive forces the reader to think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces, sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery.
