How long does it take to read Native Guard?
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey takes about 1 hour 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 4 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2007. 58 pages, about 15,950 words.
3 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 1 hour 46 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 40 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause. The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey's life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother's tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.
Subjects: Poetry, American poetry, African Americans, Women authors, Interracial marriage, African American Participation
