SHEER, a new chapbook by Martha Collins

 

Beginning with an oblique nod toward memory, Sheer moves quickly into a territory where personal loss and global violence merge, allowing the poet to explore—through highly nuanced language and insight—the psychological roots and social manifestations of war.  Gradually the book moves beyond destruction and loss to a transcendent but earth-embracing vision that acknowledges the unbreakable bonds between death and life, darkness and light, where “words are golden light, on the dark of the water.”


Martha Collins is the author, mostly recently, of the book-length poem Blue Front, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library.  Collins has also published four collections of poems, as well as two co-translations of poetry from the Vietnamese and an earlier chapbook,  Gone So Far. She is editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and the Oberlin College Press.

cover art:

Michael Mazur

Winter I (1990)

monotype on silk

12 x 12 inches

Hear Martha Collins read

an excerpt from Sheer, "From The Sky," for NPR's Weekend Edition.