News

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.” 

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. 

Ruth Williams has published, in Literary Imagination, a brilliant and thorough discussion of my three books of poetry that focus on race: Blue Front, White Papers, and Admit One: An American Scrapbook. Thank you, Ruth! The article is here

This interview with Cate Lycurgus, published in 32 Poems Online, includes conversation about most of my recent books, from Blue Front (2006) through Night Unto Night (2018).

Go here to read the interview.

Go here to see the poems and hear me read them.

A five-part poem on gun violence (with some commentary elsewhere in issue) on Plume Poetry.