This image is the cover for the book Day Unto Day

Day Unto Day

The William Carlos Williams Award–winning poet shares a new collection of “musically brilliant, psychologically intricate” meditations on time (Kevin Prufer).

This hauntingly spare and subtle poetry collection consists of six sequences: during one month each year, for six years, Martha Collins wrote a short poem each day. With perfectly distilled lines, she captures the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another—the slow burn of time passing, the ambiguity of an “old / new leaf” turning over, even as she collages a wide range of material that includes often disturbing news of the world.

Writing in the tradition of poetic meditation, Collins shows us the full degree of her mastery—a mature voice, poems with tremendous scope, and lines exceptionally controlled. Here is the work of a seasoned poet at the height of her career.

Martha Collins

Martha Collins is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently White Papers, and Blue Front. She has also published three books of co-translations from the Vietnamese: Ngo Tu Lap’s Black Stars, Nguyen Quang Thieu’s The Women Carry River Water, and Lam Thi My Da’s Green Rice. Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and for ten years she was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Currently editor-at-large for FIELD and an editor for Oberlin College Press, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

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