“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.

“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.

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.