Because What Else Could I Do

Because What Else Could I Do won the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. The judge was Alice Fulton, whose citation is quoted in the link.

The book is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet’s husband during the six months following  his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet’s grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.

In this deeply personal book . . . poet Collins (Admit One, 2016) steps away from her usual explorations of the larger social circumstances in which we live—and the pain they cause—to explore the pain of her husband’s death. This collection reads like a short story with an emergent plot that includes a last-minute twist. Many of the poems stand on their own beautifully, such as “I alone in a restaurant,” . . . but the collection should be read all of a piece and in order. Collins captures the variations in the voice of grief: confusion, despair, irony, and talismanic attention to small details. These poems are stripped and spare; they read almost like erasure poems or like listening in on the poet talking to herself only half aloud. Structurally, some poems nearly dissolve into the white space of the page, requiring careful rereading, while others knot and reknot themselves around a single word. This small book urgently and unflinchingly captures the shock and reverberation of unexpected grief.
— Barbara Egel, Booklist

Martha Collins is a weaver of emotion . . .  meticulously describing grief in a beautiful, heart-wrenching way. Because What Else Could I Do will leave readers captivated.
— Lynda Wheat, Rain Taxi

Visually delicate and emotionally substantial . . . spare and beautiful . . .                                                        — Sarah Sarai, Heavy Feather Review

20

I alone in a restaurant
and what is left of you at home

in a plastic box on your dresser where
you kept your socks and put your change—

and what will I do at home in my own
house, what will I do with my one

spoon and my wide bed, what
will I do without without



40

paper bag with   empty box with

almost empty   plastic bag    and on

my hands and on    my jeans    you

some part or   parts    of you from

when we sent    you into    the sea

low    tide so you    easily rode

the lightest   currents    in tiny    

explosions    of white    and when    

we finished    a sudden    late sun     

on the water    of which    you were

becoming    a part    on runnels  

between    patches of sand    as if you   

were signing    yourself   in silver