News at Eleven: "Like Ophelia in the poem, growing up

black and biracial in the South, I felt that I was al­ways being looked at, and that people were trying to figure out who I was," she [Natasha Trethe­wey] said. "When you write a persona poem, you give your character some of your own interior life. Ophelia was, as an inmate in a brothel, experiencing that same kind of quizzical looking."

It's a story that could easily have been written in prose.

But form makes all the dif­ference.

from Montgomery Advertiser: Well-versed

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