Something Blue

From the award-winning author of Finna comes this moving, tender collection of poems exploring love and grief throughout the journey of life

in this luminous green corner
of a beautiful, bruised continent.
there was love between
these lovers
that still happened
amongst it all.

In Something Blue, Nate Marshall reminds us that “love always happens in a time of grief. That’s how you survive. Poems sit at the intersection & sing for us.” Marshall’s third collection follows in the traditions of the epithalamium (wedding poem) and the elegy (funeral poem), bearing witness to love and grief as essential to how we understand ourselves and our unending relationship with each other.

Life is a duet of great joys and stunning losses, and within this idiosyncratic miracle that we have both the honor and horror of inhabiting, we are often left speechless. During the most important moments to us, the moments that defy words, we reach for the alchemical magic of the poem to make sense of the ineffable. The poems in Something Blue emanate some measure of that magic, proclaiming love, and specifically Black love, as miraculous.