Blue Front: [A Poem]

Martha Collins patches together an arresting and sometimes conflicting array of evidence - newspaper articles, census data, legal history, her father's own eyewitness account - to describe the brutal, frenzied lynching of two men: one of them black, one white and both left to the merciless violence of the spectators. The resulting work, fragmented and hallucinatory, is a bold and honest investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its grimly racist history.