Blue Front

Martha Collins’s father, as a five-year-old boy, sold fruit in front of the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in November 1909. What he witnessed there, along with the reported 10,000 participants, is shocking.

In Blue Front, her fifth book of poetry, 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 spectators. 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 a bold and honest investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history. Blue Front, part lyric and part narrative, is an extraordinary book and presents Collins working in important and original new ways.

“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