In conjunction with Poetry Reading with Wyn Cooper and Martha Collins,

Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal—first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times. 

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). 

Please join us for Poetry Reading with Wyn Cooper and Martha Collins at 7:30 on Thursday, July 30. More information available here: https://www.brattleboromuseum.org/2026/06/16/poetry-reading-wyn-cooper-martha-collins/