{"title":"Martha Collins","description":"Martha Collins is the author of ten previous collections of poetry, most recently Because What Else Could I Do, which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. Previous volumes include Blue Front, White Papers, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, and the paired volumes Day unto Day and Night unto Night. She has also cotranslated four volumes of Vietnamese poetry and coedited several anthologies.","products":[{"product_id":"casualty-reports-poems-paperback","title":"Casualty Reports: Poems - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eStylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal--first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. \u003ci\u003eCasualty Reports\u003c\/i\u003e is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378372411615,"sku":"9780822966869","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/9oS6_OktMC9780822966869.webp?v=1789254527"},{"product_id":"blue-front-paperback","title":"Blue Front - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003ethe victim hanged, though not on a tree, this \u003cbr\u003ewas not the country, they used a steel arch\u003cbr\u003ewith electric lights, and later a lamppost, this\u003cbr\u003ewas a modern event, the trees were not involved.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--from \"Blue Front\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMartha Collins's father, as a five-year-old, sold fruit outside the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909. What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBlue Front\u003c\/i\u003e, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence--newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations\u003cbr\u003eabout her father's own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378518130911,"sku":"9781555974497","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/y-JIRZpxp-9781555974497.webp?v=1789257957"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/martha-collins.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}