"In Blue Front, her fifth book of poetry, Martha Collins describes the brutal, frenzied lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the merciless violence of the participants. The book patches together an arresting and sometimes conflicting array of evidence - newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. The resulting work, fragmented and hallucinatory, is an investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history."--Jacket.
|
