“Through unflinching examination of her father’s experience witnessing a black man’s lynching, Collins has produced a commanding book-length poem.” —Booklist

“[Collins] creates at once a compelling, bristling story and a collage of evidence about white guilt.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book-length poem is a dramatic interpretation of the social hysteria and individual roboticism that drive our racist history, and the continuous though often almost silent pulse beneath, of reason, of outrage. It is a large and musical composition made up of voices—that intone and detail, that iterate and reiterate, that name, that shrink from naming, and that wrap and unwrap words in astonishing arias of tight, incessant and brilliant connection.” —Pleiades

“Collins’s poetic imagination is obviously engaged not just by the horrifying facts but by her connection to them.” —The Santa Fe New Mexican

“Reading this clear-eyed, sorrowing, searching poem of witness, I feel gooseflesh, and I weep, for fear and for the truth of our U.S. racism, which goes on and goes on. I admire everything Martha Collins has written, and I feel she was born to write this book. I want to quietly thank her, and to quietly thank those to whose memory she dedicates this great work." —Jean Valentine

“Blue Front is an essential book for anyone interested in the history of race and racism in the United States. Martha Collins, a poet of unfailing intelligence and linguistic gifts, has created an original collage that conveys the texture and complexity of the events surrounding a lynching in 1909. Most importantly, the book’s force accrues and moves beyond that moment; it speaks to the most urgent conflicts of our own day—and days to come. What a fiercely uncompromising writer she is! Her poetry is brave and necessary.”—Alice Fulton

“Deeply relevant to our lives and to our national history.” —Mihaela Moscaliuc, Prarie Schooner