Dimensions
157 x 203 x 6mm
A winner of America's 2010 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by D.A. Powell, Wicker's work perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser known poets.
A note on the text from the author: MAYBE THE SADDEST THING refers to a speaker's obsessive impulse and willingness to interrogate everything. "Everything," in this case, constitutes poems which ask, "In observing the world have I forgotten how to live in it?"; likewise, poems tackling the topical stuff of masculinity, identity and desire. Employing popular black icons, humor, and sonnet-like "self dialogues" as springboards to address those themes, the returns that occur throughout the manuscript are also "the saddest thing". Particularly important to this collection is a speaker's ever-shifting voice-one foot wandering the academy, the other planted firmly on the blacktop of contemporary culture.
For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.
"But if you don't close this book; I mean / drop this poem straightaway-you, me, / that boy, his mom, and every drunk dancing / fool in this shattered glass disco ball world, / we are all of us, altogether fucked."
