White Papers
Will be published approx. on 15. January 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-0-8229-6184-0 (ISBN)
Description
White Papers is a series of untitled poems that deal with issues of race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Expanding the territory of her 2006 book Blue Front, which focused on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, this book turns, among other things, to Martha Collins' childhood. Throughout, it explores questions about what it means to be white, not only in the poetAEs life, but also in our culture and history, even our pre-history. The styles and forms are varied, as are the approaches; some of the poems address race only implicitly, and the book, like Blue Front, includes some documentary and \u201cfound\u201d material. But the focus is always on getting at what it has meant and what it means to be white-to have a race and racial history, much of which one would prefer to forget, if one is white, but all of which is essential to remember and to acknowledge in a multi-racial society that continues to live under the influence of its deeply racist past.
Reviews / Votes
Collins continues the inquiry into race that shaped Blue Front (2006) here, in this startling and provocative collection, exploring the motif and myth of racial 'whiteness'. . . . Within the stark chromatic scale of black, white, and gray, Collins evokes a dazzling spectrum of palpable emotions, racial tensions, and unraveling binaries. * Booklist * This tightly focused, strongly argued book-length sequence uncovers a personal, regional, cultural, and institutional history of whiteness and white privilege: its clipped quatrains, spare recollections, and embedded citations give the rare and valuable show of a white author reflecting on the meanings and the oddities of race. . . . Some readers and cultural critics may object that Collins has simply put familiar arguments into verse; the same readers might, instead, admire how much of herself, and of her sense of form, Collins brings in. * Publishers Weekly * "White Papers is a praise song for the truth. It bravely pulls back the covers of whiteness to offer us precious views of racial privilege. Martha Collins has laid bare the more complex dangers of America's central trauma in a book of innovative craft and startling honesty. The rhythmic tapestry of this remarkable work helps open the door to a healing that is long overdue. Let this praise song be praised." * Afaa Michael Weaver * Collins' newest book of poems is doing what no other book of poems is doing right now-talking about race from a White first-person perspective. . . . There is a good deal of guilt in this collection. . . . The sense of apology is palpable. But what sets this book apart and shakes it loose from the siren-call of the sentimental is its experimental form: forty-five untitled narrative lyrics, often spare and restrained, and often playing with 'white' space on the page . . . Collins' mastery here lies in her great skill at creating a new vehicle for expressing what a whole generation of poets has quietly felt. * Mead Magazine * Deeply personal and rich with discovery and inquiry and has a feeling of collage-the poems are untitled, greatly varied in shapes and sonics, and run from embodied interiorities to modes of reporting both big and small . . . A remarkable book, a wholly unified work-a book rather than a collection-whose object lesson is one of UNDIVIDING. * The Literary Review * Collins is on a quest, a journey to unearth and destroy the racist foundation of her Caucasian heritage. . . . Her refutation of racial privilege, her knowledge, awareness, and rejection of its history and continued effect on both personal and societal attitudes, is likely the best anyone can hope for at this time. * Valparaiso Review * Collins has made a book that actually deserves to be called 'brave' . . . The book's forty-five-poem sequence inhabits the conflicted, sorrowing, complicit, fiercely ethical consciousness of its white protagonist. This speaker rejects the false comforts of history's playpen, where, if you weren't present for this or that atrocity, never called anyone names or refused service or voted for George Wallace, never did anything at all to further race hatred, you can revel in innocence. No. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and responsibility means we all suffer the pain of the past and bear the burden of grieving it. * Michigan Quarterly Review * In White Papers, Collins does the work of examining and historicizing whiteness, utilizing documentary technique to demonstrate how whiteness as an identity category has been constructed to perpetuate a racist status quo. * Literary Imagination * It's a wonderful and rare talent that produces poetry eliciting so much thought and feeling yet leaves the reader herself virtually at a loss for words. . . . The book reads of an earnestness of dedication to theme, mirrored by the very print on these papers of Collins', hitting the reader as it were between the eyes, with a glimpse of every meaning read between the lines, with the magnetic power of a lone title of a book of poetry named White Papers. * Cervena Barva Press Newsletter * The path of Martha Collins' work-selflessly risky, formally innovative, profoundly social-has always been leading to White Papers. These fierce, beautiful poems not only confront the illimitable issue of 'whiteness' itself, they are a breakthrough in the conversation we, with our fractured thinking about race, have yet to have. They defy the silences and insist nothing is unspeakable. * Gail Mazur *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Pittsburgh PA
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 148 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8229-6184-0 (9780822961840)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Martha Collins is the author of ten previous collections of poetry, most recently Because What Else Could I Do, which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. Previous volumes include Blue Front, White Papers, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, and the paired volumes Day unto Day and Night unto Night. She has also cotranslated four volumes of Vietnamese poetry and coedited several anthologies.