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.”
–DA Powell, Author of Chronic
Reading Maybe the Saddest Thing I was reminded of "Thieves in the Night," the classic Black Star track which turns a passage from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye into a biting, tender refrain. Marcus Wicker has, as Mos Def and Talib Kweli did, made an art that bridges cultures. These gregarious poems shine with metaphors born of inquiry and affection, heartbreak and hilarity. 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.
–Terrance Hayes, Author of Lighthead, Winner of the National Book Award
Maybe the Saddest Thing is anything but melancholy; these are wide-ranging Whitmanesque poems—self-aware meditations that rap and jazz their way forward, talk back, backtrack, and scratch so hard they blow out the speakers with their complicated love for a huge cast of icons, from Pam Grier to Flavor Flav, from RuPaul to Dave Chappelle. 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.
–Erika Meitner, Author of Ideal Cities
Maybe the Saddest Thing can be purchased here