Silencer

Silencer, by Marcus Wicker

Welcome to Marcus Wicker's Midwest, where the muzzle is always on and where silence and daily microaggressions can chafe away at the faith of a young man grieved by images of gun violence and police brutality in twenty-first-century America. Precisely contradictory, bittersweet, witty, and heartbreaking, Silencer is where the political and the personal collide. Driven by the sounds of hip-hop and reimagined forms and structures, Wicker's explosive second book is composed of poems at war with themselves, verses in which the poet questions his own faith in God, in hope, in the American Dream, and in himself. Pushing our ideas of traditions and expectations, these poems and queries work in concert towards creating a new dialectic.

Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is a First Horizons Foundation Distinguished Associate Professor at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.

Marcus is also featured in Mid/South Sonnets.