Casualty Reports: Poems [Paperback]

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 Reportsis both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.

“In trying times, readers will find refuge in Collins’s intelligent and generous lyric reflections.” —Publishers Weekly“The poems shine a light on the casual cruelties the powerful inflict upon the vulnerable, the exploitation, the inhumanity, the total lack of empathy. . . . The tone is necessarily elegiac but the verse is written in a style that is at once allusive and expository, suggestive and explicit.” —North of Oxford Review

PAST PRAISE:  

"A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics. Her 2006 book-length examination of the history of lynching,Blue Front, is the first serious attempt by a white poet to examine this horrific aspect of the history of American racism." —Cynthia Hogue,AWP Chronicle  

"InWhite Papers, "her daring new collection, Collins subjects herself to an unrelenting inquisition on the subject of race. As thoroughly researched as a textbook, yet as gripping as the best of memoirs.” —Megan Marshall,Radcliffe Quarterly   

"Admit One: An American Scrapbookis "a strikingly original collection that combines brilliant storytelling and compelling commentary on ethics and race." —Elizabeth Lund, Washinglƒ•