This image is the cover for the book Night Unto Night

Night Unto Night

“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

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.

Milkweed Editions