Books
Silencer
Silencer is available through the following:
Amazon // Barnes & Noble // Novel.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
First Edition: September 5, 2017
Price: $13.99
ISBN: 9781328715548
Winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award
Winner of the Arnold Adoff Award for New Voices
NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
Praise for Silencer:
“Marcus Wicker’s masterful and hard-hitting second collection Silencer is exactly the book we need in this time of malfeasance, systemic violence, and the double-talk that obfuscates it all. Wicker’s poems have the wit and rhythmic muscle to push back against the institutional flim-flam. He writes the kinds of vital, clear-eyed poems we can turn to when codeswitching slogans and online power fists no longer get the job done. These are poems whose ink is made from anger and quarter notes. They remind us that to remain silent in the face of aggression is to be complicit and to be complicit is not an option for any of us.”
“There is not a moment in this book when you are allowed to forget the complexities of a black man’s life in America. These poems evoke so much—strength, beauty, passion, fear. There is the quiet, ironic pleasure of life on a cul-de-sac juxtaposed with the tensions of always wondering when a police officer’s gun or fists might get in the way of the black body. The stylistic range of these poems, the wit, and the intelligence of them offers so much to be admired. There is nothing silent about Silencer. What an outstanding second book from Marcus Wicker.”
“Silencer is an important book of American poetry: wonderfully subtle, wholly original, and subversive. Politics and social realities aside, this is foremost a book that delights in language, how it sounds to the ear and plays to the mind. We have suburban complacency played against hip-hop resistance, Christian prayers uttered in the face of dread violence, real meaning pitted against materialism, and love, in its largest measure, set against ignorance. To say Silencer is a tour de force would be an understatement. What a work of true art this is, and what a gift Marcus Wicker has given to us.”
“Silencer disarms and dazzles with its wisdom and full-throated wit. Wicker’s highly-anticipated second collection snaps to attention with a soundtrack full of salty swagger and a most skillful use of formal inventions that’ll surely knock you out. Here in these pages, sailfish and hummingbirds assert their frenetic movements on a planet simmering with racial tensions, which in turn forms its own kind of bopping and buoyant religion. What a thrill to read these poems that provoke and beg for beauty and song-calling into the darkest of nights.”
Reviews:
“Wicker makes witty yet serious, encyclopedically allusive work whose excitable energies and wide range of diction belie the gravity of their topics: structural injustice, familial loyalty, uneasy adulthood, and institutional racism.”
“Few books of poetry will disarm readers, render them devastated, then just as easily restore a sense of passion and reverie as this collection by Wicker, a profoundly talented and inimitable author.”
“These fiercely lyrical narratives stand in the crosshairs of the political moment.”
“Over and over, Wicker’s rage alchemizes into a stunning rhythmic lifeblood that gives pulse to every verse. And yet, woven throughout the collection are gentler lines, too, ones of warmth and of love, that will break your heart twice over.”
“In bold, brash, open-hearted poems delivered with satisfying sass, Wicker, author of the National Poetry Series–winning Maybe the Saddest Thing, reflects on simply being while black. . . Highly recommended.”
Maybe the Saddest Thing
Maybe the Saddest Thing is available through the following:
Amazon // Barnes & Noble // Novel.
Harper Perennial
First Edition: October 23, 2012
Price: $13.99
ISBN: 9780062191014
Winner of the National Poetry Series
NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
Praise & Reviews:
“Flashing and dipping. Sampling and riffing. Action painting meets the pop of hip-hop. Here is a dashing figure of speech and preach, a lovepoet to the stars. In the words of L.L. Cool J: Bring in the funk, baby. ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of the Imagination,’ wrote Keats. Keats, too, would have admired the holy truth of Marcus Wicker, whose lyric wizardry astounds the ear in conclamant melodies and astonishes the eye ‘like a shard of glass catches a beam.’ ”
“Marcus Wicker has, as Mos Def and Talib Kweli did, made an art that bridges cultures….The dialogues, love letters, and reflections throughout this wonderful debut show us what it is to be in vigilant conversation with the world and with the self.”
“Wicker preaches an urgent gospel of pop-culture, desire, adolescence, race, and family, that says ‘Hell yes’ to the world with deft turns of phrase, and a rhythmic inventiveness that hurtles down the page. This fearless debut will make your head spin, your heart strut.”
“Wicker writes poems whose timely pleasures keep verging on timeless sorrows, and where the social issues of our time persistently evoke enduring human need. In the process, he captures the odd ways that our larger-than-life moment lives inside our pending irrelevance—and the compassion such knowledge allows.”
“Like a telegram, Wicker’s poems seem immediate, urgent. If we read them in a hurry, it’s because we want to know what they say, what they offer us. If we read them again, it’s because we’re caught up in Wicker’s cerebral syllabic beat boxing and, like a good hook, they get stuck in our heads.”