Incident Summary & Analysis
by Natasha Trethewey

Incident Summary & Analysis
by Natasha Trethewey

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"Incident" appears in Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Native Guard (2006). With stark understatement, the poem narrates an incident of racial terrorism—a cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan—that has haunted the speaker's family and community for many years. Its use of the pantoum form, which repeats lines in a fixed pattern, echoes the family's yearly repetition of the story. Despite the speaker's claim that "nothing really happened," the poem captures the lasting trauma that racism and hate crimes inflict on their targets.

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