Blue Front by Martha Collins (2006)

Several reviewers wrote that Because What Else Could I Do represents a departure from Collins’s earlier work, because the book is more personal and less political than her other books; and while this is true, the personal and the political—in life and in art—are always entwined. In Blue Front, Collins collages together an account of a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. The content of this book is very different from Because What Else Could I Do, yet like this later book, the syntax of both Collins’s sentences and lines is often broken, interrupted, and fragmented.

Because What Else Could I Do by Martha Collins (2019)

“Again Later” is in many ways a coda to Because What Else Could I Do. In Because What Else Could I Do, the speaker addresses her dead husband using the second-person pronoun “you.” In “Again Later,” an impersonal recording addresses the speaker using the second-person pronoun “you.”

"In Memoriam A. H. H." by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850)

Writing In Memoriam, Tennyson repeatedly used the position of a widowed woman as a metaphor for his grief over the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam.