Only the fourth volume of poems from the U.S. Poet Laureate, a young Southerner of mixed race who teaches at Emory. She dedicates the book to her father and the first poem, “Elegy,” is an attempt to capture him and his love. Focused on the nomenclature, taxonomy, and power relationships in mixed marriages and their offspring, Trethewey uses the means of “painting” as a way to delve into this history—the poem about Velasquez’s manumitted slave and assistant is particularly powerful. The contrasts and contradictions of biology and society, visual and social, actual and reflected, black and white, father and mother create a beautiful tension in these poems.