Acta

Poetry collection by Patrick Wilcox.

Patrick Wilcox is from Independence, Missouri, a large suburb just outside Kansas City. He studied English and Creative writing at the University of Central Missouri where he also was an Assistant Editor for Pleiades and Editor-in-Chief of Arcade. He is a three-time recipient of the David Baker Award for Poetry, the 2020 honorable mention of Ninth Letter's Literary Award in Poetry, and grand-prize winner of The MacGuffin's Poet Hunt 26. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Quarter After Eight, Bangalore, and West Trade Review, among others. He currently teaches English Language Arts at William Chrisman High School.

"Patrick Wilcox's poems are wonderfully strange. Strange, as in they estrange us from what we think we know of history, of society, of dreams, of love, so that we can truly see these forces and feelings clearly, perhaps for the first time. The poems in Acta are profound and funny, playful and wise. They revel in synesthetic surrealisms and fabulist narratives. They take us on walks through imaginative landscapes with exquisitely lyrical language, always circling back to deeper understandings of truth. Acta delights, inspires, moves, and amazes."

-Kathryn Nuernberger, author of RUE

"Patrick Wilcox's Acta may technically be a chapbook, but it has the emotional and intellectual heft of a full-length collection. With titles mostly taken from news headlines, these poems offer public moments as identifiable landmarks-and yet Wilcox is just as interested in the "unreal highways" our bodies "ink . . . onto real maps." His is a fatalistic world of death and ghosts and socio-historical failure-one in which we might be hanged even for our "hollow words" and we too often can't help but choose whatever disasters befall us. But it's also possible, here, for a beloved's fingertips to "sing / across the back of [the speaker's] neck," and if we keep looking hard enough at both history and the accumulating moments of our individual lives, it might be possible to "rename" what we see "until we name it right." This is a powerful and auspicious debut that deserves the fullest attention."

-Wayne Miller, author of We the Jury