“A nature diary—in which it is human nature up for exploration—MARS. Marshall’s FLOWER BOI utilizes received formal conventions in order to articulate that which resists the limitations of form or, as the poet puts it, ‘how space can be both void and / full is a trick only the BOI knows well.’ Trick? No, there are no tricks or gimmicks here; this is a poet of ravishing innovation. The vowel, that “O,” at the center of Marshall’s BOI is passageway (‘I try to make a map of my body / See which roads lead me to drink from / a river made by my hands…’); is apostrophe (‘You, who turn your palms upward, gaze at the sky, proclaim I leave myself at the mercy of you…’); and is, at last, a hero’s journey from hole to whole to ‘How holy it is, to grab light of us and say, friend….’ I can’t imagine a world where every debut is as fearless and brazen as Marshall’s Flower Boi”

—Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue