White Papers

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.