"In this luminous companion to Day unto Day" the acclaimed poet seeks to reconcile beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Like its predecessor, Day unto Day, this new collection presents six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years. It brings together the natural and the all-too-human; red-winged blackbirds and the death of a friend; the green leaves of a maple tree and drones overseas; a February spent in Italy and the persistence of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Dissonance is a permanent state, Collins suggests, something to be occupied rather than solved. And so this collection lives in the space between these seeming contrasts-and in the space between stanzas, sequences, days, and months. These poems speak to and revisit each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end.

Martha Collins is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Day Unto Day, White Papers, and the book-length poem Blue Front. She has also published four collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry, including Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (with the author). Her awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as an Anisfield-Wolf Award, two Ohioana Awards, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes. Founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.