Here's what I suggest: Look this book of poetry over, then read Adam Plunkett's May 29th review, "Patricia Lockwood's Crowd-Pleasing Poetry", at www.newyorker.com, then read the comments below that, then read: Mallory Ortburg's "How Not to Review Women's Writing" at http://the-toast.net/2014/06/02/how-n... ... then read Joanna Russ's 1968 How to Suppress Women's Writing, then refer to #Yesallwomen, then read some Angela Carter and Gertrude Stein and some short stories by Borges and some poetry b...

                             The hornet begins to flytoward the cheerleaders. "Make methe point of your pyramid," he breathes.And they take him up in the air with themand mix and match his parts with theirs,and all come down with one gold stripe,and come down sharp and stunned,and lie on the ground a minute, all think-ing am I dead yet, where am I, did we win. I'll readily admit that a lot of this went over my head. Or maybe not even over my head exactly, but around, through... my head was in

"Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after giving birth to American Poetry."Okay, maybe this quote doesn't particularly represent Patricia Lockwood's poetry (or does it?)—I just thought it was funny, and to be completely fair it's pretty much impossible to pull a line or two from Patricia Lockwood's poetry and make it stand in for the whole. This is some of the densest, most intense poetry I've ever read. In each po...

I got to "The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer" and gave up.I feel like the title hooks are there to attract your attention but the poetry is not my cup of tea.

"Who is not an atheist about Emily Dickinson's body, which istotally unbelievable." Reading this poetry collection on an October morning in an anonymous café, I have a feeling of past, present and future meeting for a brief moment. It is all there - the classical erudition, woven into the strange postmodernist reality we have created for ourselves, and an outlook on even stranger time-in-space encounters in a bleak or sunny future.In the quest for a newborn Gary, Lockwood looks at the aging of a...

lockwood's no one is talking about this and priestdaddy are two of my favorite reads of the year, so i was hoping to adore her poetry as well. i can recognize her biting humor and her skill with words, but much of this book went over my head! it's intense and clever and strange, and made me wish i were wiser."rape joke," lockwood's most well-known poem, is incendiary and wonderful. i also really liked "he marries the stuffed-owl exhibit at the indiana welcome center," "the fake tears of shirley

I had no experience with Patricia Lockwood's poems until now. Poems are what these are called; I assure you I did not make this up. Yet, they feel like short stories. There are 31 poems in this collection. The paperback is only 66 pages long. The cover looks like a bad dream one can't wait to wake from. Starting out strong... At least the first 3 or 4 poems are close to brilliant...in an extremely creative -shocking-mind-twisty-way. Once I got pass "Lizard Vagina", Canada....and Bambi...( every

I really should have liked this more, I just... didn't."Liked" is the wrong word - these poems should have captured me, bewildered me in all the right ways, dazed me with clever wordplay and broken my heart in all the heartbreaking rawness of it all.They didn't.Instead (and this is awful), I kept imagining this: (Which is when Gayle read her poems on Bob's Burgers and it made a mockery of bad poetry readings)And this, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals isn't even bad poetry, exactly, it just....

To think I almost passed this collection by. To think I looked at the title, looked over it, nearly overlooked it with my skim eye. But something catches. Something pulls. You know Patricia Lockwood has a knack for it.This was incredible poetry—weird, rude, heart-rending, poignant, downright bizarre, and rip-roaringly hilarious; poems about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman's tit-pics, Niagara Falls getting drunk, a man marrying a stuffed owl, and Bambi doing pornography together between the cove...

"the father and mother of American poetry are back from the dead for just one day. They are standing up out of their graves, turning to each other, exchanging their tit-pics!Not sure if I'm correct in doing this but I laughed a lot at this poetry, some of it is soooooooooo rude, I had to leave the room to giggle otherwise I would have to explain my laughter to my kids. Bambi doing porn and a poem showing just how dirty nature can be were brilliantly funny. The rape joke was one of the darkest p

Lockwood's poetry is incredibly strange, and luckily, I'm the exact market for "incredibly strange." Toeing the line of unreal speculation and painstaking honesty, Lockwood manoeuvres between surrealism and stark reality. "Rape Joke," probably her best-known poem, was the only one of hers I'd read before I read this collection, and it remains my favourite by a lot.The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.Lockwood's "Rape Joke" reminded me of two oth...

I had really high expectations for this book of poetry, it was going to be clever and shocking. I was really disappointed that I found it to be neither. It reminded me of listening to a clever teenager trying to sound jaded or be shocking without the depth of experience to avoid being trite. I will freely admit I spent very little time with this work, because it failed to please me or hold my attention in any way. So I am not saying the work has no merit, just that I didn't like it.

Not my cup of tea. I prefer vodka!

I absolutely loved "Rape Joke", "Revealing Nature Photographs", and "The Father and Mother of American Tit Pics" -- who can't enjoy a poem about Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and jokes about boobs? Most of the others were just fine but didn't really do anything for me.

I wish I admired Lockwood's collection, I really do. There are some poems that come close to successful, and one ("The Rape Joke") which really hits home. Too many poems seem please with little dirty jokes or attempts at humor. "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" "The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple" and "The Descent of the Dunk" all come close. Too often I feel that what strives to be free and experimental is just undisciplined and needing rewriting.The main conceit that nations and landscapes are t...

This poetry collection is 1/4 heartrending powerhouse and 3/4 bonkers hilariousness. There are poems about sexual assault and patriarchal culture intermixed between poems about deer doing pornos, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman tit-pics, a sports mascot experiencing ecstasy with the cheerleading squad, and Niagra Falls getting drunk at a wedding. Some of the imagery was difficult for me to follow, which is the case with many of the poetry collections I read, but I absolutely loved this book. Fu...

Firstly I think Rape Joke is already a classic and if it isn't it deserves to be, it's such a great piece of writing. Much of the rest of this collection is wilfully "crazy" and taken as a whole felt kinda samey and even annoying because you know she's good. Patricia Lockwood has an actual new voice, which is rare, she can make you feel unusual emotions and I only wish she'd not hide behind the very white indie wackiness and zeitgeistiness so much. I'm really up for reading more of her.

'The Father and Mother of American Tit Pics' won my heart.

Since the poem Rape Joke went viral and was read by an estimated 100,000 people (rightfully so), this book felt somewhat like the record you buy after hearing the brilliant lead single. It's understandably difficult for the rest of the album to sustain your expectations. There is a focus and clarity to Rape Joke that I found myself missing during some of the more stream-of-consciousness poems. But there are still plenty of other high points like The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple, List Of Cross-Dr...

Poignant, rough, raw, offensive. This collection of poetry shows what it is like to not give a rat's ass. Patricia Lockwood grabbed my attention, offended me, and made me want to read more...in fact, she kind of made me want to punch someone in the face. This collection of poetry will both disturb and amuse and is an excellent asset to any edgy poet's collection.