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jackieeh's review
5.0
This should instantly become part of the Chicago canon. The high school love letters and the poems telescoping backwards or forwards especially got to me in a collection that constantly got to me.
honeysenchalatte's review
4.0
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!!
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!!
towardinfinitybooks's review
3.0
Read Harder 2016 Challenge task: Read a book that is less than 100 pages.
3.5 stars.
Favorites (links are to poems online if available):
"Granddaddy was the neighborhood" (link, p. 58)
"palindrome" (link)
"in the land where whitefolk jog"
"recycling" (link)
3.5 stars.
Favorites (links are to poems online if available):
"Granddaddy was the neighborhood" (link, p. 58)
"palindrome" (link)
"in the land where whitefolk jog"
"recycling" (link)
poetics's review
5.0
“...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.
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.
decafjess's review
5.0
"shake us. we make terrible tambourines. packed into class, kids passed like kidney stones."
ceah_reads's review
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.
mikhailareads's review against another edition
emotional
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
3.5
jw2869's review
3.0
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.