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Blue Front - by Martha Collins (Paperback)

 Blue Front - by  Martha Collins (Paperback)
Store: Target
Last Price: 15.99 USD

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<p><b>A stunning account of racism, mob violence, and cultural responsibility as rendered by the poet Martha Collins</b> </p><p><i>the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this </i><br><i>was not the country, they used a steel arch</i><br><i>with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this</i><br><i>was a modern event, the trees were not involved.</i><br>--from "Blue Front"</p><p>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.</p><p>In <i>Blue Front</i>, 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 speculations<br>about 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.</p>

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