Head off & split : poems

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.

Resurrection of the errand girl: an introduction -- The hard-headed: Red velvet -- Left -- My time up with you -- Plunder -- The Condoleezza suite: Concerto no. 5: Condoleezza & intransigence -- Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza (working out) at the Watergate -- Concerto no. 11: Condoleezza and the Chickering -- Concerto no. 12: Condoleezza visits NYC (during hurricane season) -- The head-over-heels: Thunderbolt of Jove -- The aureole -- Shaker: Wilma Rudolph appears while riding the Althea Gibson Highway home -- Cattails -- Heirloom -- Orangerie -- The clitoris -- Brown girl levitation, 1962-1989 -- The head-waters: Dancing with Strom -- Segregation, forever -- Negroes with guns -- Hash marks -- Men who give milk I -- Alice Butler -- Penguin, mullet, bread -- Liberty Street seafood -- Head off & split -- Instruction, final: to brown poets from black girl with silver Leica.