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.”
This story is from the September - October 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the September - October 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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