Natasha Trethewey's mother was murdered by her former stepfather when Trethewey was nineteen, and this memoir excavates that loss to understand both the woman who was killed and the poet who survived. Trethewey, who served two terms as United States Poet Laureate, writes with precision about growing up in Mississippi and Georgia in the decades after the Civil Rights movement, about her parents' interracial marriage and its dissolution, about the violence that shadowed her childhood and erupted finally in her mother's death. The book is structured around Memorial Drive, the street in Atlanta where her mother was shot. Trethewey returns to that location and to the documents that survive: police reports, photographs, her mother's diary, trial transcripts. She pieces together evidence of abuse that was ignored or minimized, asking how a woman could be killed by a man who had already threatened her life without anyone intervening effectively. The memoir is also about artistic becoming, about how grief and memory shape a writer's vocation. Trethewey's mother loved poetry and encouraged her daughter's gifts; her death deprived Trethewey of her first and most important reader. Readers interested in memoir, poetry, domestic violence, or the long process of mourning will find this book devastating and necessary.