Martha Collins Reading :: Tonight!

Join us at 7:00 for a reading by Martha Collins at the Montgomery Street YMCA. In addition to poems, there will also be coffee & people. So these are three amazing reasons to attend. Need more? Read these reviews of Martha's book BLUE FRONT & then talk to me about it later - 7:00. Downtown Y.


Collins has a story to tell, but she makes the reader work for it. She is, at least with regard to syntax, a language poet — she suppresses punctuation and traffics in fragmentary non sequiturs; her shifts in perspective are abrupt. Therefore nothing about the narrative is straight. Her discursive, breathless, self-contradicting, breaking-off-and-circling-back technique makes the book feel like the testimony of a traumatized witness.

NY Times.


Collins forces the reader to enact the work of making meaning from that which is fragmentary, revised, and erased. And it stands in, too, for the brackish flood of connotations pooling up inside the language itself, inside words like track, lynch, cut, and burn, which take on—through Collins’s luminous interspersed riffs on their definitions and colloquial usages.

The Literary Review.