Three Births | Granta

  • Published: 07/03/2024
  • ISBN: 9781915051097
  • Granta Books
  • 96 pages

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.

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

This artful, sensual debut by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists explores the fluidity of the body, queer love and desire... Patrick is unafraid of the vicissitudes of emotion, setting the atmosphere ablaze in a display of manic irony that is simultaneously hopeless, poignant and visceral

Jennifer Lee Tsai, Guardian

The Author

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 forthcoming from Fourth Estate in 2023.

More about the author →

K Patrick on Granta.com

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Robert Gluck & K Patrick

‘Desire charges the landscape with physical upheaval. We become water, weather. And why not? Why describe a character by the hat she is wearing instead of her experience of orgasm?’

Robert Glück and K Patrick on writing desire.

Poetry | Granta 166

David Attenborough

K Patrick

‘Motherhood is this chapter, / we all love a mother, / disastrous as it is.’

Poetry by K Patrick.

Poetry | The Online Edition

Blood comedy

K Patrick

‘Stopping has become a mutual desire. The things we want to stop. Mostly sounds of other people.’

A poem by K Patrick.