Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is a Cave Canem Fellow whose work has appeared in Poetry magazine, New Republic, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.Marshall h
"In a nifty, memorable trick of wordplay, the last poem in Nate
Marshall's rich first book is the same as the first, except in
reverse. This form is a chiasmus, a highfalutin poetic name for the
X, or sight of the cross. This is fitting because Marshall's book
is about handshakes and code words, about crossing and re-crossing
his home landscape, the Wild Hundreds, a neighborhood in far South
Side Chicago between 100th and 130th streets. It's a landscape
punctuated by fame, food and liquor and what Marshall calls the
down-home migration taste of Harold's Chicken Shack. In Marshall's
hands, it's also a place of ambition, ambition cut short, of love
letters and hood words and pallbearers. Poems condense around what
Marshall calls their percussive imperative, around bittersweet
vignettes - trying to buy shoes, trying to graduate, trying to fit
in at smart camp. . . . Reading Marshall, it's impossible not to
remember Gwendolyn Brooks circling another South Side Chicago
neighborhood in her 1945 classic, "A Street In Bronzeville." In
that book, a collage of voices captures a neighborhood hemmed in by
poverty and racism. In Marshall's work, the problems and the music
are updated."
--Tess Taylor, NPR Book Reviews
"'The Hundreds' is a place, a people, and one way to define
centuries. 'Wild' is an epithet-become-style. Ergo, Wild Hundreds
is a style of centuries. If our third millennium lyric ever comes
to terms with America, it will have to accommodate symbols and
syntax once denigrated and dismissed. With his dynamic debut
collection, Nate Marshall is making space. And it's wild."
--Patrick Rosal
"A testament to home, to struggle, and to survival . . . a reminder
of the places most people would rather forget. Marshall's poetry
has such a rhythmic percussiveness, what I'd call a drumbeat
leitmotif, which forces an urgency on each word in the collection.
Marshall also shows a tremendous control of craft and form
throughout the collection, seamlessly interweaving triptychs,
couplets, and prose poems without feeling forced."
--Devil's Lake
"In his powerful debut collection, winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch
Starrett Poetry Prize, Marshall explores the perils and praise
songs of black lives on the South Side of Chicago. Much of the
collection takes shape through the voice of a young black man
navigating high school, family, friendships, and the physical and
mental dangers that surround him as he strives toward manhood.
Marshall, a coeditor of The Breakbeat Poets anthology, displays his
talent for tight narrative snapshots throughout, particularly in
poems such as "Indian summer," which makes use of searing,
multifaceted imagery that challenges the reader to see the dangers
of summer for young black Chicagoans and why they "pray for rain."
The poem "Mama Says" deftly explores the toll of mental trauma
experienced by Marshall's speaker as he attempts to reconcile the
violent deaths of friends. Some poems struggle to do more than
simply present raw emotion and experience, but these are small
bumps in an otherwise impressive debut. Marshall's poetry offers an
insider's perspective that asks the reader to parse the
sociopolitical systems that imperil black lives--not through
abstract ideology, but through authentically rendered eyes: "every
kid that's killed is one less free lunch, / a fiscal coup. welcome
to where we from."
--Publishers Weekly
"Life is repetition. Rhythm's in the gaps. Notice the vacant lot,
these poems insist; the unsaid 'something about gin' in a narrative
of one's Grandaddy and his relationship to the South Side; the
'garbage bags, ' once filled with a beloved sister's things,
suddenly 'absent from your room'; the wide caesura that represents
'all the chilling' a speaker--shaky eyed from Hennessy--'won't do.'
Read these poems for the who, the what, the how that's missing, and
discover a way out of no way as process. In Wild Hundreds, these
breaks make a beat: 'a percussive imperative' that thumps love,
love in spite of all, because of all, in the heart of this fine and
tenderhearted debut."
--Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
"Nate Marshall uses high-energy diction to create convincing and
moving urban scenes, perhaps as well as anyone has ever done in
poetry."
--Ed Ochester, judge
"The dominant emotion of these poems is love, unquestionably. The
word itself crops up often enough, but the feeling is present in
nearly every verse, one way or another. . . All the poems have
great energy and clarity. Rooted deeply in a particular place and
set of experiences, they're nevertheless welcoming and accessible.
There's a generosity in Marshall's voice, even at its most
justifiably angry and uncompromising, that invites the reader to
enter his world fully. These poems are never written from a distant
or defensive stance, and thus they deliver a sense of intimacy and
possibility. 'Ours is a long love song' is the collection's final
line, and it seems to suggest, with wounded but hopeful
inclusiveness, that the song of the Wild Hundreds is a song that
belongs to us all."
--Chapter 16
"The Chicago that Nate Marshall evokes in Wild Hundreds is more
than the sum of its shames and griefs and anxieties and break beats
and scraped knuckles and smoking gun barrels and wild forgettings.
It's the windows rolled down on a Saturday evening in August. It's
that sweet old Curtis Mayfield Impressions song you hear out the
window of a passing car, telling you to keep on pushing and it's
all right."
--Best American Poetry
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