Martha Collins

Poet, Translator, Editor

News

Casualty Reports: New Book to be published in October 2022 in the Pitt Poetry Series

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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 […]

Article about my books by Ruth Williams

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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

Interview with Cate Lycurgus

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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.

William Carlos Williams Award

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My tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do, has just won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. The judge was Alice Fulton. Here is her citation: Alice Fulton’s Citation: Throughout her distinguished career, Martha Collins has devised a poetics of justice and revelation. Her singular aesthetic reaches its apogee in this sequence […]

First Review of Because What Else Could I Do in Booklist

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In this deeply personal book (initially not intended for publication), 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 […]

Because What Else Could I Do: just published!

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Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to my husband following his unexpected death in 2016.  I wrote them for him, for his abiding presence—and I wrote them for myself. At the time, I had no intention of publishing them. But the book will […]

Summer Workshop

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Chautauqua NY I will be teaching a week-long workshop this summer from June 23-29 in Chautauqua, New York. See the Events page of this website for information.