Casualty Reports : Poems

Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book.She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal - first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present.Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.