Blood Percussion

(By Nate Marshall)

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Author	Nate Marshall

“Book Descriptions: Nate Marshall’s Blood Percussion, a runner-up for the 2013 Button Poetry Prize.
Books ship within 10 business days of order.

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Nate Marshall was paying close attention when Chuck D said, “Rap is CNN for Black people.” In
his hard-hitting chapbook, Blood Percussion, Marshall takes the Hard Rhymer’s words and masterfully
applies them to poetry, turning his eye toward gun play, free lunches, skull caps, prayers, and praise
songs. With wit and fierce music, these poems take on the subjects that can’t find a space on the
evening news, reminding the reader again and again that there is power and grace in truth-telling
even when those truths are difficult to hear.
–Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

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With language that swerves, spars, and startles, Nate Marshall’s Blood Percussion adamantly asks us
to consider our youth as more than mere statistics or headlines. These poems fearlessly embody
the voices of boys and girls who grieve, wander, love, dream. In a world where appearances are
consistently privileged, Marshall’s poems remind us how necessary it is to render the interiors of
those whose lives we cannot let slip into the cracks of the very sidewalks we all traverse.
–Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam

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What can be said? Blood Percussion is what it sounds like it is: A full body experience, poems that wail
& juke in every register. Each page of this thing carries a lyric force that’ll make you sit upright or
throw the book against the wall or just sit there for a second, shook, wondering where all the room
in the room went. It’s not just that Nate Marshall can flat-out write. Yes, the formalistic elegance of
these poems is certainly worth the price of admission all by itself, but there’s also a singular courage
to this work, an engagement with the fullness of its characters’ lives that makes every stanza feel like
celebration in the face of danger on all sides, the beautiful refusal of dominant narratives that would
seek to quell such fire, such love. These are poems to be read aloud and often. This is the difficult
music we need.
–Joshua Bennett, founding editor of Kinfolks Quarterly”