Known Aliens

Marcus Wicker seems to hear hip-hop everywhere. First established by his two previous collections of poetry, Maybe the Saddest Thing and Silencer: A Second Collection of Lyrical Hip-Hop Poems on Police Brutality, Racism, and Resistance, Wicker knows how to forge verses that reflect the ear of someone who is both a rap scholar and a student of classical poets. In Dear Mothership, Wicker uses this same lyrical knowledge to chart us through planet Earth as though we were aliens. Fueled by a lyricism that feels at once like rap, jazz, and funk, we revisit what it means to be human by looking at ourselves through an extraterrestrial lens.

The book is divided into five parts: “No Takebacks,” “Static,” “Dear Mothership,” “How to Continue Loving the World Despite Years of Impediment,” and “Coda.” The title of the first section gives off an air of playfulness, like something a child might say, and that playfulness is threaded through many of the poems. In “Self-Portrait with Mixed-Up Sports References,” the wackily mismatched language becomes a way to approach deeper meaning. Wicker writes, “Fadeaway / punter of the Saturday night invite. Star / pinch hitter of the rain delay.” We begin to wonder if maybe this is a poem, not about being bad at sports, but about being bad at love. Or maybe both, since both are deeply human experiences. Later in this poem, Wicker offers a volta that seems to land meaning: “The give-love-&-go seek shelter / in a dugout. I’ll call back / when the season’s over. Now there’s an X /& an O that could stand more practice.” We are talking about love. And sports. But it is practice that makes perfect when it comes to love.

Several poems in the collection reference the COVID-19 pandemic and the coinciding racial uprisings. In “Blursday Blues,” Wicker acknowledges the unreliability of time during that period. He writes, seemingly in conversation with every other Black creative, about the surrealness of sudden demand: “My inbox rang / like a siren. Anti-racist became a badge. / Garlic against the unseemly. / Name-Drop Magazine underpaid patronage for this statement.” What does it feel like for the world to call your name all at once, without actually calling you? Placed next to other poems that bridge the wacky and the wise, we realize that Wicker is still telling us how to get through this strange place. With laughter.

Dear Mothership is punctuated by poems formatted as though they are lyrics printed on the inside of an album cover. Since the collection is heavily influenced by music, it feels safe to assume this is Wicker’s intention. In “Where Did You Come From?” he leaves us to imagine the beat behind “Stankonia / a planet of astral frequencies,” but what we know for sure is that it is stank. Which is to say, funky, the kind of vibe that makes you twist up your face like you have smelled something bad. But it is really that the music smells so good, it almost smells bad.

The book’s crown jewel is “The Break Beat Crown,” a sequence where Wicker links several poems through a variation on sonnet redoublé. In this French poetic form, the poet employs the final line of the previous poem as the first in the following. But Wicker, a master of form and sound, remixes this technique. In his rendering, only a fragment of the last line appears in the first or even last line of the following poem. He considers himself a disc jockey in this sense, as he notes: “The point is to splice disparate rhythms and subjects, whole and partial phrases, to produce fresh ideas and music, as with a sampled song.” Here, he follows the legacy of his musical heroes, OutKast, well known for blending genres. Wicker also uses the term ATLiens throughout the book, because of the group’s 1996 album by the same title.

The final section of Dear Mothership contains one solitary poem, dedicated to “the one we call The Dot.” Wicker chronicles the impending arrival of a new extraterrestrial who will emanate from a single dark point on an ultrasound into the world. He is anxious to make music with The Dot, still in Mom’s belly. He writes, “I’ve tried to distill your heartbeat into a voice note clear enough to send to your uncle Brian, so he can flip the sample into the coldest lullaby.” He will guide this being, too, through a world that will probably see The Dot as alien. Dear Mothership is for every outsider, those who are foreigners now and who may become aliens in the future.