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

“The close reading of poems is, I think, a practice for paying close and careful attention to the world and its many others and countering the reduction of political and social discourse to bland repetition and vicious epithets,” writes Martha Collins in the Introduction to Word Work. Perhaps best known for her poetry focusing on race and her co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, Collins addresses those issues in several essays and reviews in this book, which also includes many insightful discussions of poetry, poems, and books of poems. She concludes, in the Introduction: “The urgency of this work is more apparent than ever, as I write these words in 2025. We have work to do, and some of it is word work.”

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/