Because What Else Could I Do: Poems

By Martha Collins

Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet’s husband during the six months following his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet’s grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780822986928

Martha Collins

 Martha Collins is the co-translator of Dreaming the Mountain and Black Stars. She has also published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous books of poetry include the paired volumes Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night, as well as a trilogy of works that focus on race, beginning with the book-length poem, Blue Front. Collins has published three additional volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and coedited a number of volumes, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Founder of the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston and former Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Collins lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

1

August 25, 2016

they’re coming to get

me arrest jail horrible

problem something

stupid decades

ago a legal mistake I

won’t be coming back

to the house that key

is on the shelf in the

please try to forgive

2

almost thirty years you in your

house I in mine every week

end here or there there was

no question only whether here

or there there was no question

3

that September morning you drove

into your driveway at 7:30 just

as I was fetching the papers, drove

from the wrong direction, I thought

and later that day would think

you might have been seeking a place—

but you really went to the gym

that morning, at 6:19, the woman

said, Such a gentle man, everyone

said, you went to the gym

each day, taking care of yourself,

1,243 times, the woman told me

4

can walk you there, glasses

folded and left in your car

your blue striped shirt, shorts, your

can