K Patrick | Granta

K Patrick

K Patrick is a poet and fiction writer based on the Isle of Lewis. In 2021 they were shortlisted for both the White Review Poet’s Prize and Short Story Prize, and in 2020 they were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship. Their debut novel Mrs S is was published by Fourth Estate in 2023.

Publications

Three Births

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.