A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins
Martha Collins's father, as a five-year-old, sold fruit outside the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909. What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking.
In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence - newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculations about her father's own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.
ISBN: 9781555974497
Published Date: May 30, 2006
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Page Count: 84
Size: 8.88" l x 6.09" w x 0.42" h
Poetry
American - Various