2/5 stars
How’d I find it? On repetitive drives where I don’t have to check for directions, an audiobook is just the thing. I read this over a few days in both ebook and audiobook form thanks to DC Library.
Why not 3 or more stars? As a fan of Trethewey's poetry, I was excited to read this book. Poets who branch out to other genres are endlessly interesting to me (Hanif Abdurraqib and Ocean Vuong, for example). However, when I came across the word "wound" on the first page, I rightly feared that Memorial Drive was not my taste. I recognize that a page one "wound" is a strange pet peeve. But hear me out. Through my reading, I've discovered that writers with this word ready to drop at the jump typically rely on an arsenal of sensuous, relevant language that speaks to the culture of identity around which much of contemporary poetry revolves. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I find that if I pick apart the loveliness of the word choices in many of these types of books, there's not much else to recommend. That is the case here.