Blue Front
Paperback or Softback 88 pages May 30, 2006
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A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this was not the country, they used a steel archwith electric lights, and later a lamppost, thiswas a modern event, the trees were not involved.--from "Blue Front" 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 speculationsabout 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.
- Author:
- Martha Collins
- Publisher:
- Graywolf Press
- Publication Date:
- May 30, 2006
- Number of pages:
- 88 pages
- Binding:
- Paperback or Softback
- ISBN-10:
- 155597449X
- ISBN-13:
- 9781555974497