The turn that I would like to discuss occurs in Martha Collins’ “[14],” the fourteenth poem in White Papers, a collection in which Collins examines the complexity of white privilege in America. White Papers is a singular achievement, to be sure, but it is also part of a larger project that Collins started in Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). In that book-length poem, Collins writes about a lynching that her father witnessed when he was a five-year-old boy living in Cairo, Illinois. The investigations of that project led Collins to write White Papers. Throughout the collection, Collins explores the dimensions of whiteness as the color of cotton that was grown and commodified in the South; as the color of ivory on piano keys; as a metaphor…