Blue Front

Collins's fifth volume and first book-length poem concerns a horrifying lynching in her father's hometown. In Cairo, Ill., in 1909, two men (one black, one white) suspected of rape were murdered by a crowd; local newspapers celebrated the event. In sometimes narrative, sometimes impressionistic modes, Collins moves out from Cairo ("the most southern point in all the North") to the sad history of race relations in southern Illinois and throughout America since the Civil War. Snippets from letters, postcards, statistics, eyewitness reports and other documents mingle with Collins's own appalled voice to create a work that mixes resolve with horror: "Often they cut off parts for souvenirs... Children were often there they were being taught." With debts to W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs and William Carlos Williams's Paterson , Collins (Some Things Words Can Do , 1999) creates at once a compelling, bristling story and a collage of evidence about white guilt. Another strand follows the poet's father (five years old in 1909) through his young adulthood (which may have included involvement with the Ku Klux Klan—common, even ubiquitous, there and then) into his kind old age. "What he had seen/ is also what I was," Collins writes: "I had to know." (June)