Word Work: Essays, Reviews, Reflections

“The close reading of poems is, I think, a practice for paying close and careful attention to the world and its many others and countering the reduction of political and social discourse to bland repetition and vicious epithets,” writes Martha Collins in the Introduction to Word Work. Perhaps best known for her poetry focusing on race and her co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, Collins addresses those issues in several essays and reviews in this book, which also includes many insightful discussions of poetry, poems, and books of poems. She concludes, in the Introduction: “The urgency of this work is more apparent than ever, as I write these words in 2025. We have work to do, and some of it is word work.”