Head Off & Split; Poems

Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011. Later printing. Trade paperback. Very good. xv, [1], 97, [7] pages. Signed on title page. National Book Award Winner sticker on front cover. Autographed Copy sticker on front cover. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Nikky Finney (born Lynn Carol Finney on August 26, 1957 in Conway, South Carolina) is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for Head Off & Split. Finney's fourth book of poems, Head Off & Split, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2011. On October 12, 2011, Head Off & Split was announced as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Awards, with Finney honored as the 2011 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry on November 16, 2011. Her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, touching on race, reading and writing, was extraordinary; host John Lithgow judged it "the best acceptance speech for anything that I've ever heard in my life". Head Off & Split was selected as the 2015-2016 First Year Book by University of Maryland, College Park. This work provides an opportunity for students and faculty to delve into complex topics using a common text. Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, Winner, 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry, Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry, Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in PoetryThe 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.