In Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey (born 1966) depicts the American Civil War from the point of view of emancipated slaves fighting for the Union. She thus questions this new freedom, which does not cancel old preju dice and perpetuates a domination inherited from slavery and still ongoing nowadays in the United States. The Black poet uses a flexible sonnet crown, a form which provides a narrative progression constituted of subjective fragments while claiming the European form of the sonnet in order to explore a shared past, both specifically Black and resolutely American.