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Blue Front

Blue Front - Paperback

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Availability:In StockContributor:Martha CollinsPublish date:05/30/06Pages:88
Language:EnglishPublisher:Graywolf PressISBN-13:9781555974497ISBN-10:155597449XUPC:9781555974497Book Category:PoetryBook Subcategory:AmericanSize:9.20 x 6.48 x 0.30 inchesWeight:0.3505Product ID:SCTJQC6HSG

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 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.

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 evidence--newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations
about 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.
Language:EnglishPublisher:Graywolf PressISBN-13:9781555974497ISBN-10:155597449XUPC:9781555974497Book Category:PoetryBook Subcategory:AmericanSize:9.20 x 6.48 x 0.30 inchesWeight:0.3505Product ID:SCTJQC6HSG

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.


Publisher: Graywolf Press

Contributor(s)

Martha Collins

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