COMING OCTOBER 1st, 2025!
PRE-ORDER: Now through September 20th, pre-order with free shipping in the U.S. by using the discount code WORDWORK at checkout.
In the introduction to Word Work, Martha Collins writes: “The close reading of poems is, I think, a practice for paying close and careful attention to the world and its many others, and countering the reduction of political and social discourse to bland repetition and vicious epithets.” Perhaps best known for her poetry focusing on race and her co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, Collins addresses those issues in a number of essays and reviews in this book, which also includes many insightful discussions of poetry, poems, and books of poems. She concludes, in the Introduction: “The urgency of this work is more apparent than ever, as I write these words in 2025. We have work to do, and some of it is word work.”
ISBN 978-1-7329012-4-7
2026$20.00Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Collins has received numerous other awards and fellowships, including the New England Poetry Club’s 2025 Golden Rose, a lifetime achievement award. She has also published five volumes of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, including Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ (with Nguyen Ba Chung; Milkweed 2023), and coedited several anthologies, including Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (with Kevin Prufer; Graywolf, 2017). Collins founded the UMass Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, where she was an editor for FIELD magazine and the Oberlin College Press. Like Her Body the World: Selected Early Poems is forthcoming from Unbound Edition in 2027.
COMING OCTOBER 1st, 2025!
PRE-ORDER: Now through September 20th, pre-order with free shipping in the U.S. by using the discount code WORDWORK at checkout.
In the introduction to Word Work, Martha Collins writes: “The close reading of poems is, I think, a practice for paying close and careful attention to the world and its many others, and countering the reduction of political and social discourse to bland repetition and vicious epithets.” Perhaps best known for her poetry focusing on race and her co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, Collins addresses those issues in a number of essays and reviews in this book, which also includes many insightful discussions of poetry, poems, and books of poems. She concludes, in the Introduction: “The urgency of this work is more apparent than ever, as I write these words in 2025. We have work to do, and some of it is word work.”
ISBN 978-1-7329012-4-7
2026$20.00Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Collins has received numerous other awards and fellowships, including the New England Poetry Club’s 2025 Golden Rose, a lifetime achievement award. She has also published five volumes of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, including Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ (with Nguyen Ba Chung; Milkweed 2023), and coedited several anthologies, including Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (with Kevin Prufer; Graywolf, 2017). Collins founded the UMass Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, where she was an editor for FIELD magazine and the Oberlin College Press. Like Her Body the World: Selected Early Poems is forthcoming from Unbound Edition in 2027.
