Admit One: An American Scrapbook

An unflinching look at the underpinnings of racism in the U.S. . . . Her poems are lists, definitions, newspaper pages, historical time lines, and biographical facts. These diverse poetic forms highlight the beauty of diversity itself. But Collins never lets up on the driving themes of unethical treatment and collective culpability.

Booklist

Praise for Martha Collins:
“A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century . . . in supple and complex poems. . . .[N]o subject is off limits for her piercing intellect.”
—Cynthia Hogue, AWP Chronicle

More Praise

Collins' brilliantly disturbing verse leaves us with the grim hope that imperial whiteness can give way to incendiary witness.

Radcliffe Magazine

In Admit One Collins traces the ideological constellation of scientific racism illustrating how it was used to justify not just racism, but also colonialism, xenophobia, and the sterilization of those deemed physically, mentally, or morally ‘unfit.’

Literary Imagination

A strikingly original collection that combines brilliant storytelling and compelling commentary on ethics and race. . . . Exquisitely spare, these works recount some of the sinister moments of American history, quietly pushing readers to learn from those episodes and consider our collective responsibility for them.

Washington Post

Like any scrapbooker, Collins collects and assembles, and largely lets the scraps do the talking. But when she reveals to us the collector's hand, injecting the personal like handwritten notes in the margins, she reminds us that we are not merely witnesses to history. We are its participants, inheritors, and bloodline.

MassPoetry.org

Collins goes past the paralyzing silence of white guilt and into the active language of implication. One feels in her work the compulsion to discover, and to confront. Poetry is the vehicle of response for Collins, and we are the richer for having the results of her grappling. She locates our country's legacy of racism in her own familial connections, therefore speaking from a position more like witness than judge.

Solstice Magazine

Table of Contents

Sample

104 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

March, 2016

isbn : 9780822964056

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

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.

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