Nate Marshall – Transformation
Poets & Writers Magazine|September - October 2020
In his second collection, Finna, Nate Marshall explores the failures and triumphs of language, the power of community, and abolition as a poetic praxis.
By Julian Randall. Photographs by Mercedes Zapata
Nate Marshall – Transformation

Nate Marshall isn’t interested in being “once in a generation,” but he is a poet fiercely curious about both generations and generations. He is a poet I turn to when I’m looking for a long love song, propulsive and methodical. Like Chicago, the city we both love and will always call home, everything in Nate Marshall’s poems comes from love but isn’t interested in being romantic. We have things to reckon with, and a world to build with language that was generated in Black mouths drumming up from the American South, where our mutual mystery begins, to the cities that promised a place we could build, stay, love, mess up, fall, laugh, hurt and get hurt, transform, make and make again. “Nothing about our people is romantic / & it shouldn’t be,” Marshall writes in “the valley of its making,” a poem in his new collection, Finna, published in August by One World. I feel it in my very marrow, this collective power in a language we make and unmake with a love that, as he writes in “imagine,” is “a great idea / we keep having every day.”

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Literary MagNet
Poets & Writers Magazine

Literary MagNet

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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Poets & Writers Magazine

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