Blue Front
A poetry collection that traces racial violence in the American South through fragmented, collage-like verse and documentary material.
Work Information
Fragments of testimony make the memory of violence hard to erase.
Using the lynching in Cairo, Illinois, and her father’s childhood memory of it, Martha Collins examines the history of whiteness and violence in poetic form.
Review Summaries
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Readers often find the fractured structure challenging at first, but many say it lands with real force by the end and admire how it gives violence a language.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Graywolf Pr
- Published
- 2006-05-25
- Pages
- 84 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.6 x 0.48 x 23.5 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781555974497
- ISBN-10
- 155597449X
- Price
- 3221 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this was not the country, they used a steel arch with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this was a modern event, the trees were not involved. from Blue Front Martha Collinss 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. In Blue Front , 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 evidencenewspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collinss speculations about her fathers 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.
Martha Collins is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Some Things Words Can Do , and co-translator of two volumes of poetry from the Vietnamese. She teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Martha Collins is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Some Things Words Can Do , and co-translator of two volumes of poetry from the Vietnamese. She teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Marth Collins teaches at Oberlin College.
Reviews
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This woman is a shockingly fine, eviscerating poet. She takes on large things with the precision of a neurosurgeon, with the clarity of a Buddhist monk, with the immediacy and honesty of a child. One would not want to live in her skin, with her antennae. But we finish this book grateful, shaken, enlarged. Martha Collins and Blue Front are the almost too-real thing.
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I was skeptical at first given the subtitle of Martha Collins' book being "a poem." However, it is beautifully written and has a unity that is rivaled only by the varying forms that Collins uses throughout.
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I gave this book of poetry 5 stars because Ms. Collins totally captures so many individual scenes and differing emotions relating to this tragic event.
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Excellent