A winner of the 2010 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by D.A. Powell, Marcus Wicker’s Maybe the Saddest Thing continues NPS’s thirty-year tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser known poets, a list that has included Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez. A note on the text from the author: “Maybe the Saddest Thing” refers to a speaker’s obsessive impulse and willingness to interrogate everything. “Everything,” in this case, constitutes poems which ask, “In observing the world have I forgotten how to live in it?” Likewise are poems tackling the topical stuff of masculinity, identity and desire. Employing popular black icons, humor, and sonnet-like “self dialogues” as springboards to address those themes, the returns that occur throughout the manuscript are also “the saddest thing.” And particularly important to this collection is a speaker’s ever-shifting voice—one foot wandering the academ