In this Book
- Head Off & Split: Poems
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: Northwestern University Press
Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 GCLS Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.
Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. 2-11
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xv-19
- The Hard · Headed
- Red Velvet
- pp. 7-12
- My Time Up with You
- pp. 17-22
- The Condoleezza Suite
- pp. 33-40
- The Head · over · Heels
- Thunderbolt of Jove
- pp. 43-45
- The Aureole
- pp. 46-47
- The Clitoris
- pp. 56-57
- Brown Girl Levitation, 1962–1989
- pp. 58-59
- The Head · Waters
- Dancing with Strom
- pp. 63-68
- Segregation, Forever
- pp. 69-71
- Negroes with Guns
- pp. 72-75
- Hash Marks
- pp. 76-93
- Men Who Give Milk I
- pp. 77-79
- Alice Butler
- pp. 80-81
- Penguin, Mullet, Bread
- pp. 82-84
- Liberty Street Seafood
- pp. 85-87
- Head Off & Split
- pp. 88-94
Additional Information
Copyright
2011