Description

An extraordinary and playful debut collection by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, exploring the joy and fluidity of queer love.

An interrogation of the erotic and romantic becomes refracted, as though through a prism, towards beings, lovers, states, objects, landscapes, systems, in K Patrick’s ground-breaking debut book of poems. These are notes towards a contemporary queer experience that emerge from the body, dodging and playing with logic to create a brand new poetics. Patrick’s subversive and distinct poetic manoeuvres through a marriage and a subsequent divorce, nature writing and 20th Century literary figures with agility, delicacy, candour, and humour.

By turns both innovative and empathetic, Three Births documents the absurdity of obsessive desires, giving room to states of flux and flow in the body, relationships, ecology and place. George Michael, the history of inches, the ache that lives behind a ‘rigid seam’: a high-wire linguistic utopia is put forward in Patrick’s easy-going, cool and ironic tone, which zaps with syntactic-synaptic wildness. Three Births culminates in the subtle but powerful message that we should be able to inhabit the body we want to inhabit and love freely within this.

Publisher Review

This is a shrine of a collection on which are placed small offerings of fever, masculinity, thrumming sex, belief, and ecstasy. Surreal and cinematic – an absolute thrill of a read, and an instant LGBT classic — Joelle Taylor Three Births tears apart our established conceptions of personal history and reimagines multiple forms of bodily transformations in a world buzzing with gender politics and overshadowed by the climate crisis. Shamelessly self-mocking, K Patrick writes with an incendiary sense of humour. These strange, erotic, unsentimental poems have a rebellious energy drawn from a sharp eye and diction — Kit Fan