Blue Front by Martha Collins

Blue Front by Martha Collins

Martha Collins patches together an arresting and sometimes conflicting array of evidence - newspaper articles, census data, legal history, her father's own eyewitness account - to describe the brutal, frenzied lynching of two men: one of them black, one white and both left to the merciless violence of the spectators. The resulting work, fragmented and hallucinatory, is a bold and honest investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its grimly racist history.

Martha Collins doggedly recounts the history of scientific racism from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair to the present day in Admit One: An American Scrapbook. The eugenics movement of the 1920s influenced the St. Louis World's Fair. Collins creates a scrapbook of snippets, quotations, narrative passages, and lyrical riffs from a range of documentary sources, including her Illinois grandfather's newspaper, that expose striking parallels between the Fair, the Bronx Zoo, and beliefs that resulted in anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and eugenic sterilization legislation in 1924. Changing portraits of the exhibited African Ota Benga, the sterilization victim Carrie Buck, and the eugenicist Madison Grant, whose reach reached to Nazi Germany, are among the book's repeating components. Collins combines thorough research with inventive poetry approaches to create an riveting depiction of a period of American history that haunts us even today, as she did in her book-length poem Blue Front and continues in her investigation of race in White Papers. Admit One is a fantastic, disturbing, and necessary book.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781555974497
ISBN 10	155597449X
Title	Blue Front
Author	Martha Collins
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Graywolf Press,U.S.
Year published	2006-05-30
Number of pages	88
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.