Three Births

by K. Patrick

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.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Lesbian

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2024

Reviews

[Sonja]

Rich and thought-provoking, full of feeling poetry.

“What to do about these bodies not mine?
Birdsong etches on to glass, repeat.”

K Patrick is a queer writer. I recently their nivel Mrs S and was very impressed.

[Allie Oliver]

Really good. Best poetry book I've read in a minute. My faves were:

- pickup truck sex
- countdown
- David Attenborough
- the George Michael one
- three births

[Juliano]

“It is very beautiful to let my bullfinch / heart strut, to have it look out at a view / glorious with my organs, the otherside of / skin. Allow myself a transformation / into that precious alive.” In K Patrick’s exceptional debut poetry collection, Three Births, queer love and desire are eternally unfolding alongside images of the natural world and the human body’s relationship to it. Sensual and funny and vivid, Patrick’s poems reimagine what we can be and do with our bodies, casting queer liberation as ecstatic yet fraught. “A bod-/ily grammar should, like the body, be full of holes”, they write at the end of ‘Swarm’; “Love finds an eventual limit / worth enforcing”, they observe in ‘Super’. Structured according to the four seasons, the poems move from the rebirth of spring to summer’s horniness, the tenderness of autumn and winter’s harshness. There is the daring title poem, an extended sequence which maps the multiple becomings of queerness, and so many other striking poems: ‘Hypochondria of the Heart’, ‘Procession’, even ‘Summer’, a single exclamatory line: “Big almanac of longing!” In the first poem, ‘Pickup-Truck Sex’, they opine that “Pleasure will continue to fold us up” — it does, throughout the collection. Elsewhere “Intimacy has been failing us, / very gradually, blank after blank, we talk / in blanks. Mouths in a graveyard, breath light / over graves.” And later, “Across your collarbone I leave dint after dint. Fuck up my tomb I’ll come back and haunt you.” There are so many moments like this in Three Births, in which K Patrick delivers, through the clearest of expressions and the most subtle of turns, true depth and devastation and deliverance.

[Kate]

K Patrick has such a unique and distinctive voice. Although I preferred their prose over their poetry, the themes they choose to write about are very consistent. Queerness, butch masculinity, love, longing, connection with nature, finding a sense of self.

I have definitely found a new author I will be keeping up with and I look forward to what they write next.

[Harry]

4.5 - cherished this totally confident and fresh work, which loops around seemingly everything: the erotic, the natural world, George Michael and Kylie. so good.

[Maxine McEwan]

4 stars. A fantastic little book of poetry. Very gay and very British.

[Emma Reilly]

really cool, unafraid to reference… reviewing for my paper!

[Stephanie]

3.5 stars

[erika ellingsworth]

k patrick min gud

[jadyn]

favorites:
pickup truck sex, three births, have, again, butch, procession, david attenborough

[Kirsten Schulz]

A poor collection of poetry tauted as inspired queer writing.

Favorite line - “Love finds an eventual limit worth enforcing”

[Fay S]

Not for me