Wildhundreds

“Nate Marshall uses high-energy diction to create convincing and moving urban scenes, perhaps as well as anyone has ever done in poetry.”

“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.”

“‘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.”