Dear Mothership

In Dear Mothership, Marcus Wicker channels the lyrical dexterity of Outkast and the speculative vision of poet Robert Hayden to chart a course through personal and political upheaval.

The collection’s centerpiece is the “Break Beat Crown”—Wicker’s original take on the heroic crown of sonnets—presented as a travelogue from an extraterrestrial who has touched down in modern-day Atlanta. Across linked poems, the outsider records field notes on pandemic discord, isolation, tenderness, late-stage capitalism, empathy, and art. The longer the speaker inhabits a dysfunctional society, the more alien he feels. In addition to these science fictional experiments, Wicker delivers affecting, personal poems grounded in lived experience: lingering grief over two miscarriages, the sudden death of a friend, a sustained search for joy on the other side of those heartbreaks.

With its singular imagination, Dear Mothership kindles a new understanding of what makes us most human.