Blue Front, my 2006 book-length poem that focused on a lynching witnessed by my father when he was five years old, won a 2007 Anisfield-Wolf award and was the featured book in the online Anisfield-Wolf Book Club for April 2026. Here’s the link, with an excerpt from the award and study questions:
News
Golden Rose Award
On August 10, at 3:00 pm, I was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s Golden Rose Award, one of the nation’s oldest literary prizes. The presentation, which included a reading by me, took place on the East Lawn of the Longfellow House in Cambridge, and was also livestreamed.
Dreaming the Mountain is a PEN America Poetry in Translation finalist
Nguyen Ba Chung’s and my translations of Dreaming the Mountain, Poems by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tuệ Sỹ (Milkweed, May 2023), was a PEN America Poetry in Translation finalist. A new review was just published (July 2024) in DVAN.
Translators’ introduction and two poems by Tuệ Sỹ up at Waxwing.
Translators’ Note by Nguyen and Ba Chung and me. “A Slender Moon” and “Descending the Mountain” in both Vietnamese and English. The poems are in Dreaming the Mountain, which will be published by Milkweed Editions on June 13, 2023.
Casualty Reports published!
Martha Collins’s eleventh book of poems, Casualty Reports, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series on October 11, 2022. The press describes the book as “a lament for the casualties of corporate destruction, racism, war, and personal loss. In an early review, Charles Rammelkamp writes: “Collins does for coal mining what Herman Melville did for whaling. . . . Casualty Reports is a devastating indictment of our time, of our species, of our less than honorable stewardship of the earth.”
Casualty Reports: New Book to be published in October 2022 in the Pitt Poetry Series
Stylistically 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. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.