This London

Two thousand years ago a tiny village was founded on the marshy banks of the River Thames. Since then, this outpost of a crumbling Roman Empire has become an international city, a magnetic intersection between cultures and histories. London was once the capital for millions of colonized people around the globe, including—for nearly 200 years—a land that would eventually become the United States. For good or bad, our tongues move with words and ideas that bubbled up from this mighty city. In this new collection, Patrick Hicks explores connections between history and place, colonialism and language, visiting and belonging, and he points out the hidden streets and personalities of a city that changed the world.

Patrick Hicks is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, as well as Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Finding the Gossamer (Salmon, 2008), and his work has appeared in scores of journals such as Ploughshares, Tar River Poetry, Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Indiana Review, Nimrod, and many others. Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, he has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and he is the recipient of a number of grants, including one from the Bush Foundation to support his first novel, which is about Auschwitz. After living in Europe for many years, he now enjoys thunderstorms rolling across Midwest America.