Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

FINNA

Nate Marshall

Poems

FINNA features dynamic poems that celebrate the Black vernacular and engage with the world through the lens of Hip Hop as well as America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets--from an award-winning author and poet.

By definition, the word finna means (1) going to; intending to, rooted in African American Vernacular English. (2) eye dialect spelling of "fixing to." (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. In FINNA, Nate Marshall creates a lyrical and sharp celebration through poems which address the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy.
In three key parts, FINNA explores the mythos and erasure of names in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, through the celebration and examination of the Black vernacular, expands the notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope. It is a fun and accessible examination of language that is intellectually challenging and concerned with expanding visions of justice, while also welcoming in those who are kept out of conversations that concern them.

Nate Marshall is an award-winning author, editor, poet, playwright, performer, educator, speaker, and rapper. He is the author of WILD HUNDREDS (University of Chicago Press), which was honored with the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association's New Writer Award, editor of THE BREAKBEAT POETS: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books), BLOOD PERCUSSION (Button Poetry), and 1989, THE NUMBER. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College, an and a member of The Dark Noise Collective (with Fatima Asghar, author of IF THEY COME FOR US) and co-directs (with Eve Ewing) Crescendo Literary. Marshall wrote "No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks" with Eve Ewing, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation; and the audio drama "Bruh Rabbit & The Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq.," which was produced by Make-Believe Association. As an educator, Marshall co-wrote Chicago Public School's first literary arts curriculum. A native of Chicago, he completed his MFA in creative writing at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program and holds a BA in English and African American diaspora studies from Vanderbilt University. Marshall has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Michigan.

Available products
Book Published 2020-08-11 by One World

Comments

This book is one of my instant favorites, and an indispensable offering to the canon of black poetry and poetics.... inventive and intimate ... a marvel...

Simply outstanding poetry. Readers are going to say these poems are raw but they aren't. They are elegantly and precisely crafted, frank, and full of realness about blackness, masculinity, family, and Chicago.

FINNA... looks likely to become one of the most talked about books of Chicago poetry since his close friend Eve Ewing's 2017 collection "Electric Arches"... It's full of precision and exuberance, elegance and a rollicking good humor. As for that title, "FINNA," it's slang - or rather, as Marshall writes in the book, "a whole slang of possibility." Roughly, narrowly, it means gonna, or intending to do something. "But it's one of my favorite words," Marshall said, "because there's a lot in that, because it's a word that mostly Black Chicagoans would recognize. And it connects back to the South. And it's about everything that comes next. It says, this is what I'm about to do. It recognizes a past, and it's forward-looking." It says, here is a major career about to happen. It says, here's Nate Marshall.

...I am grateful for this newest entry in Nate Marshall's arc as a writer, grateful for possibility, for this Blackest language, our collective and percussive love.

Nate Marshall's long-awaited second collection is a dazzling and heartbreaking book, surely the year's breakthrough volume. Beginning with a series about his name - poem by poem, Marshall reclaims himself in sound.. Read more...

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".

Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular - its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy. Read more...

Finna is a book full of this kind of complex aphoristic love, often direction for and toward his people, as the dedication elegantly puts it: "the ones I love &/especially the ones I struggle to love." Stripped of most commas, using ampersands to pivot, Marshall's syntax beautifully transmits sound - and that sound across Finna is one of longing and anguish, grief and regret. It is a Black voice celebrating its sound. These poems ache to be said aloud and upon reading sink deep.

In Finna, I hear Etheridge Knight, I hear Terrance Hayes, but most vividly, I hear Nate Marshall naming his many selves as some flee, others linger, and one in particular threatens to hunt him down. And yes: "I feel you Nate Marshall. / i've left places & loves / when they told me they loved / a Nate Marshall I didn't recognize." Don't be fooled by the calm and assured clarity of this poet's voice; there is a tripwire hidden in damn near every line break.

Marshall's poems celebrate black vernacular's impact on pop culture and its relationship to survival and storytelling. The poet defines finna through poems that consider the violence against black lives and oppressed groups in modern America. Read more...

My original blurb was "this book decent" but I was told that the editor* wouldn't go for that so I am going to tell you instead that this book catalyzes a necessary conversation about Black language practices, culture, ownership and belonging, and the commodification of Black people's tongues. And then it flips the script by offering a discomfiting reflection on masculinities, the ways we hurt each other, and what it would look like to sculpt a version of manhood that isn't intimately linked to violence. So, like I said, this book decent.

Rich and reflective... In four sprawling, intertwining sections, Marshall explores masculinity, the effects of community and familial relationships, and the role of Black language in imagining a livable future...Marshall is a wizard of the anecdote, finding resonance without over-explaining... This is a memorable, thought-provoking, and impactful collection.

Marshall explores a range of subjects - from his fourth-grade spelling bee to his love of hip-hop - but they are all informed by his experiences growing up on the South Side. Read more...

Electric, essential, and ultimately hopeful as [Nate] examines all facets of the modern Black experience.

Finna is a hip millennium blues song shot through with bolts of joy and humor; an innovative homage to home; and a trenchant critique of so-called race in these so-called United States. Please believe, there ain't no sophomore slumping for this super talented poet.

Nate Marshall's Finna examines the lived experience of Black Americans and other oppressed people during an era of freshly emboldened white supremacy. Marshall asks crucial questions about erasure and violence, uses hip hop as a critical lens, and celebrates Black vernacular as a language of resilience, community, and hope. Read more...

Nate Marshall had a fantastic interview with NPR's Scott Simon and read three poems on NPR's Weekend Edition this Saturday. Read more...

The poems in this collection deal intimately with the possibilities and limits of language, specifically black vernacular as the title of the collection suggests. Read more...

I love how Marshall reimagines the idea of a homeland... We're in a moment that demands taking a history of violence and building something new, and that's what Marshall does so beautifully. Read more...

Instagram story / 6 poets read their work for Poetry Month Read more...

Seven stellar poets - among them Nate Marshall - Share Poems In Honor Of National Poetry Month Read more...

These poems here, these backhand slaps of what-you-didn't-know-you-needed, finna be that swift fissure in the landscape of lyric. This werk is relentlessly rhythmed, deja-Chi all over again, and it's finna hit harder than necessary or known. These snippets of precisely bladed black boy gospel, penned by the nonpareil son of the wild hundreds, finna resound and reach an impossible reach - in fact, if karma knows its stuff, this craved-for and combustible collection finna find itself peeking from the back pocket of that other Nate Marshall's stiff and sturdy MAGA-issued denims.

I place Finna in the lineage of books that remind me why I first took to language: not only to see it wielded with the thoughtfulness and wide-ranging brilliance of writers like Nate Marshall. But also to see the language my people speak (and the lives punctuated by that language) leap off of pages, and build a world I feel immersed in, and not standing outside of. I am thankful for the honesty and self-examination in this work, yes. But even beyond that, I am thankful for a speaker who speaks as my people might, yelling across a parking lot or during a card game. I am thankful that this, too, is a part of the honesty this marvelous collection is in pursuit of.

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America's vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope. Read more...