Three Births: K Patrick Poetry Launch
Featured Speakers
K Patrick & Elsa van der Wal
We are delighted to be welcoming K Patrick to Lighthouse to launch their incendiary debut poetry collection, Three Births!
An extraordinary and playful collection by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Three Births explores 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. 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. Join us for a night of mesmerising poetry, performance and discussion, and a glorious dose of queer joy to see out LGBTQ+ History Month!
About the author:
K Patrick is a writer based in Glasgow. Patrick's work has appeared in journals such as the Poetry Review, Five Dials, The White Review and Granta. In 2021, Patrick was nominated for The White Review Prize in both poetry and short story categories. Patrick's debut novel Mrs S was published in 2023, a year in which they were also named an Observer Best Debut of the Year and one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta magazine.
Our Chair:
Elsa van der Wal splits their days bookselling for both Typewronger Books and McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. In the evenings they dabble in drag and dance trapeze.
