Blue Front

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