Additional information
by Marcus Wicker (Author)
"Tough talk for tough times. Silencer is both lyrical and merciless-Wicker's mind hums in overdrive, but with the calm and clarity of a marksman."
--Tim Seibles, author of One Turn Around the Sun and finalist for the National Book Award
A suburban park, church, a good job, a cocktail party for the literati: to many, these sound like safe places, but for a young black man these insular spaces don't keep out the news--and the actual threat--of gun violence and police brutality, or the biases that keeps body, property, and hope in the crosshairs. Continuing conversations begun by Citizen and Between the World and Me, Silencer sings out the dangers of unspoken taboos present on quiet Midwestern cul-de-sacs and in stifling professional settings, the dangers in closing the window on "a rainbow coalition of cops doing calisthenics around/a six-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound man, choked back into the earth for what/looked a lot, to me, like sport."
--Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke and finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize "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."
--Maurice Manning, author of One Man's Dark and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Author Biography
MARCUS WICKER, recipient of a Ruth Lilly fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Cave Canem fellowship, is the National Poetry Series-winning author of Maybe the Saddest Thing. Wicker's poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, the Boston Review, and more.
