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From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks’s second collection explores the question, Where do our desires take us?
An offspring of Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Hicks’s A Map of My Want follows a nonbinary femme as they explore the sensual intersection of the personal and the political, a crossroads to which their sexual liberation brought them after their escape from a religious cult. Lyrically, Hicks interprets the US Declaration of Independence's infamous “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for themselves. Combining storytelling with Western astrology, this poetry collection is an intimate erotic spell through which Hicks conjures joy as they develop an alternate theory on how to attain happiness—through ecstatic healing.
“A Map of My Want is an essential collection that burns with resilience, eroticism, and the pursuit of freedom on every page.”
—Ruben Quesada, author and editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry
“Faylita Hicks's A Map of My Want is a poetic knowing of jail, sleeping cots, bills, and of riding feral pleasures beyond to the self's heat. Their poetry sings, and invites the reader to sing along—ecstatically.”
—Maud Lavin, author of Push Comes to Shove
“Each poem in A Map Of My Want is a special magic that inhabits the deepest parts of the psyche, digs in, and resists forgetting.”
—Airea D. Matthews, author of Bread and Circus
“A Map of My Want vividly paints a theology of self-love, one that transcends the shifting world around it and somehow anchors us, firm-footed, in the wanderlust of belonging.”
—Deborah Mouton, author of Black Chameleon
“Reading A Map of My Want—so muscular, impassioned, and wide-awake—it's not difficult to believe that bull’s-eye poetry is alchemy, that healing the un-nursed self is healing the world.”
—Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
“Too often we are fooled into thinking we are in control of our desires—Faylita Hicks is gracious in the correction of our folly, in reminding us that the body always draws the map, and we merely follow it.”
—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
"The work reflects her belief in radically renovating established systems (such as jail or the sexual binary) to obtain a meaningful sense of wellbeing. In her poet-activist role, Hicks demonstrates that the written word has great power in the process of meaningful change."
—Emily Sipiora, Chicago Review of Books
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx writer, spoken word artist, and cultural strategist. Hicks is the author of the critically-acclaimed debut poetry collection HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Julie Suk Award, and the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize. The former Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Hicks has also received fellowships and residencies from the Tony Award-winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, and Texas After Violence Project. Their poetry, essays, and digital art have been published in or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, and Yale Review, amongst others.