Wild Hundreds

by Nate Marshall

Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.

Genres: Poetry, Race, Fiction

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. His first book, Wild Hundreds, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His rap album Grown is due out Summer 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wabash College. He received his MFA in Poetry at The University of Michigan where he also served as a Zell Postgraduate Fellow. He received his BA at Vanderbilt University. A Cave Canem Fellow, his work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Indiana Review, The New Republic, [PANK] Online, and in many other publications.

He was the star of the award winning full-length documentary Louder Than A Bomb and has been featured on the HBO Original Series Brave New Voices. He is also a Poetry Editor for Kinfolks Quarterly. Nate won the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. He was a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Nate was named a semi-finalist for the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Contest. He was also a 2013 finalist for the Indiana Review Poetry Prize.

Nate has been a teaching artist with organizations such as Young Chicago Authors, InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, and Southern Word in Nashville. Nate is the founder of the Lost Count Scholarship Fund that promotes youth violence prevention in Chicago. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. Nate has performed poetry at venues and universities across the US, Canada, and South Africa. He is also a rapper.

Reviews

[Traci Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nate Marshall is so talented. He writes complex and layered poetry that is accessible. He finds humor in the horrors of life. His stuff is so Black and unapologetic. Plus he’s super creative with form. A really great poet steeped in MC/hip hop tradition.

[Naori · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I’ve been re-reading this book of poetry because I need to understand Wildness in this moment. In this moment of Ahmaud Arbery’s slaying. I need to understand the wildness in people. The wildness in us. There is one poem in this collection called “Chicago high school love letter”, and it only says,

“graduation

333.

hold me
before
i
disappear.”

The Asterix down at the bottom says that 333 is the number of homicides that happened during the Chicago Public School’s Academic Year. This is a moment in which humanity is failing us, and all I know to do is to turn to literature, to art, to music to explain to me why this is happening. Our children are going to school with guns and getting murdered for going jogging because of the color of their skin. We need to know this wildness. We need to step to it, call it by it’s name, and together we need to tame it. So that the next poet who writes a book about wildness, has a poem entitled 0.



Previous review:
I need hundreds of something to understand this wilderness...maybe heartbeats, maybe heartaches, maybe scrapes, bruises, maybe footsteps on concrete pavement. Maybe it’s the pattern you get on the back of your arms when you lean against a hard metal fence on a hot day. Maybe if I had all of those things at once I could capture the whole of these poems. But I don’t have it - I’ll come back and give you some lines...

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

“...summertime & dying is easier. june is jazz
or a funeral dirge. july, thick thump
of a rap record or dull thud of
hood cliche.”

this is an ode. a love story of youth, of blackness—of the places where blackness went to die (or so they say). a tribute to a city and its south side. poetry blends with memory and we are easily swept up in this recounting and retracing of marshall and his experience growing up in chicago on the south side. you can’t read a line in this body of work and not feel all the love that he has for the city and for us, black people. he plays with form and draws you in, making you wish that each poem was neverending in its beauty. no matter how devastating some of them may be.

there is so much that is familiar in marshall’s work. anyone that’s grown up in the hood, around the block or up/down the street from the all encompassing corner store, knows each line of these poems with an aching familiarity. even if we “make it out”, these places never leave us. they stick to our bones and hug along our veins. every one of us has our own “whilehunits” we could write about.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry collection by Nate Marshall

[haydée · Rating 4 out of 5]

i revisit this poetry collection about once a year and after re-reading a third time, have found new ways to love the work.

Marshall gives us so much experiential knowledge about the hearts that beat, and stopped in Chicago, specifically his relationship with living in the 100s of South Chicago. poignant, and enraging, this collection is one i use with my youth literary arts groups and they always talk about how his words still reflect a lot of the nuances today living while black, young, skeptical and praising the spaces and places that made you.

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was gut punched.

And I'm not even familiar with Chicago.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerfully written, and touching, I grabbed this book on a lark at my local (Chicago-based) bookstore and really dug his sense of place. From the political to the personal to the hood to nature, my man is multifaceted in his subjects and pretty good in his wordplay.

[Maddie Annis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 — not my favorite on the whole, but there are glimpses of the brilliance of Finna Nate Marshall (mama says, ragtown prayer, prelude, when it comes back, praise song, juke, cut). interesting to see where those exceptional Finna poems grew from

[Theodore]

this is love letter to Blackness, to the south side, to chicago. its also an atlas of Marshall navigation of being Black and the experience of growing up, the wild suffering of everyday life.

Marshall's work is so profoundly affirming and has been instrumental in encouraging me to become more comfortable with this art form. to which i'm so grateful.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some readers may know Nate Marshall from Louder than a Bomb. This collection of poetry is beautiful, moving, rich, surprising...
Thanks to F&J for thinking of this for me.
Perfect!

[Bob Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a collection of poems about the author growing up in Chicago. I don’t know much about poetry, but I really enjoyed reading this book.

[paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

A love letter to Chicago. Gorgeous portraits of youth and love. Stunning.

[Isabelle Ouyang · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent series of short personal poems. Marshall is an engaging poet, and writes beautifully.
Lots of good gems in this one. Picking Flowers and Recycling had to be my favorites. This line from the poem Palindrome is imo the best example of the wit/beauty in the images he creates: "throwing up gold medal ribbon ice cream into cups./
it rounds into scoops, flattens into gallon drums/
of sugar & cream & coldness. we are six years old."
Also I saw him perform some of these poems live, and they read aloud beautifully!!

[Bree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully portrayed book about the south side of Chicago. We get a real look into his childhood and his experiences. My favorite thing about poetry, which I feel like I say every time, is the honesty. You get this non-bullshit version of someone's truth. It just speaks to you because of how powerful personal truths are. Thank you Nate Marshall for sharing your truth and I'm sure many people out there are reading your book nodding along with you. May your words live on and impact lives. I will spread my love for your work along to may others.

[Caitlin]

Nate Marshall's Wild Hundreds is painfully beautiful and stark and bright, a South Side song to a part of Chicago far too often overlooked or pontificated about by people who don't know it. It's as quintessentially Chicago as Nelson Algren, or as Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems, from which Marshall quotes, and I think one can well say that Wild Hundreds shows that the South Side is that beauty so real.

[Jalisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was decent. The poems didn't always hit home for me, but there were some standout poems like "Mama Says" and "repetition & repetition &." This might resonate a bit more for someone from Chicago, but for me it was such aight.

[Eddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just excellent. Such a dynamic collection of poems. I don't read poetry much, although I've been reading more as of late. I found this to be very accessible. I'd highly recommend taking the time to engage with these poems. Very moving. And searing.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few of these poems are excellent and a few would have been with a bit more time and space.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that if you read it on the CTA will cause strangers to strike up conversations with you.

[Shawn Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love when poets play around with form. Nate Marshall has a knack for experimenting with different forms such as palindromes and prose poetry. Many of his poems have this affect of running out of breath or running out of time. For example, "recycling" contains many uses of "&" to continue adding and building to the cycle of college life that I'm assuming Marshall went through. Moreover, his use of "you" positions the reader in the role of poet, both as an empathetic device but also as a way to hold the reader and the speaker accountable in the actions displayed throughout the poem.

Marshall doesn't just write about his own life, but venerates the lives of others such as in "palindrome" where the speaker details a mother's past and present reality from looking at her social media profile. Palindromes are meant to be read forwards and backwards and Marshall's use of it to go back in time to "un" something or cancel out its existence such as "unpregnant," "unaborts," and "unlearn."

Overall, a reflective read that still resonates. Whether that's a good or bad thing can be left up to interpretation.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read Marshall for some time now, this seemed like a great place to start - what is essentially an ode to Chicago. I'm far from a poetry expert, in fact I'm trying to really expand my horizons in this particular art form, but this is some of the best recent poetry I've read. Lists of adjectives pop up as I reflect - evocative, haunting, lovely, joyous. "prelude" and the series of "Chicago high school love letters" will live with me forever, especially the revelation at the end of the latter.

[Teddi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kind of gritty realism is present in Wild Hundreds that felt more like grief than the celebratory power within Finna. Immaculate word construction and a deep dive into Marshall's personal history and the pains that sit inside him. Beautiful and crispy.

The poems in part iii were a crescendo that ended the volume perfectly. But, imo, pallbearers (just before part iii) was the best poem in the book. Incredibly clever, tying friendship with death in a way that many (white) folks don't know or easily overlook.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sealey book 20.

The main question in my mind as I read this collection was whether I liked it or Finna better. I’d say the tone and themes are very similar and SO engaging. It’s really hard to pick favorites in a collection this compelling but I will say “Mama says” was the most surprising to me, “learning gang handshakes” made me think of Jose Olivarez writing love songs for his besties, and “palindrome” was such a cool reading experience and I wonder if I can write in both directions like that.

[Caroline Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have met this author a few times, and his poetry about growing up on the Southside in Chicago and just being a black man, in general, was so powerful and moving and insightful.
A lot of his poems can be very intense with a lot about the abuse and hardships he has faced, but then they also highlight his carefree attitude and his goofy side as well.
He's an amazing dude, and if you're afraid to read poetry, I highly recommend this book as a starting point for anyone who wants to try.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highest quality, body moving, heart-clenching poetry. Nate Marshall’s poems about Chicago’s South Side weave love, trauma, fear, racism and segregation, youth culture, food, and family. Titles include “1st love song to the black girl at smart camp,” “in the land where white folks jog,” and a series dedicated to Harold’s Chicken Shack. I will read this again.

[Brandon Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never read much poetry before this year--what a time to start. Marshall's phenomenal. These poems are full of love and tragedy and beauty and community, showing a Chicago that needs to be shown, a fuller picture of what the national story about this city has become. The overall structure builds on themes and words and ideas and flips and delves and plays with them to profound effect.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing collection of poetry to (probably) end on in 2017. There are so many lovely, funny, and heartbreaking poems in this collection. It is excellently structured and edited. I'm gonna go search out more of Nate Marshall's poetry and Dark Noise now.

[Aarik Danielsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent, singing collection. Marshall's portrait of the Chicago he loves — and which lets him down — and his interior revelations are equally powerful. Recommended if you like Kaveh Akbar, Hanif Abdurraqib and Fatimah Asghar.

[Mrs.Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Marshall’s voice. I have not visited nor am I familiar with Chicago outside of narratives and poetry I’ve read and studied. He has some powerful arguments that I think will work well in my classes next year.

[Khepre · Rating 5 out of 5]

A damn good poetry collection. Marshall writes with urgency as he tells the message of Chicago from the Harold Chicken highs to the lows such as high Crime in Chicago that is sadly prevalent still today.