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mattleesharp's review against another edition
4.0
God bless Patricia Lockwood for her dizzying pop culture mad lib nightmare brain. God bless Octopus Books for so consistently putting out interesting and worthwhile writing. This collection is wonderful. As one comment below put it, it teaches you how to read it. Patricia Lockwood is its own dialect sometimes and as wonderful as it is, it can also be a little exhausting. Some of these poems feel both rushed out and overwrought where they normally wouldn't because of the general language choices for the collection. But this collection viewed as a whole is still just undeniably impressive.
thecurbau's review against another edition
4.0
This is a rapidly immersive selection of poems. I quite enjoyed this journey into the askewed look at the world.
reverendpear's review against another edition
I can't fairly give this a rating, because I was frankly way too dumb to follow most of it. Someone really smart please read this and explain it to me, because it seems wonderful
tombomp's review against another edition
4.0
first I admit I am not very good at poetry. I struggled with reading this sometimes which is why it took me a while. Sometimes I was really afraid of not "getting" it but I found it easier once I took it slower and let the images wash over me without trying to resolve them into clear forms. the book is filled with surreal dream logic and progression connected by metaphor. a lot of poems are around extending the logic of cartoons and comics and drawing and the connection between "reality" and representation eg what is the biology of a popeye. There's so many fascinating images in here with lots of incredible ideas that keep me thinking after reading. and then they swing to the next idea through a strange tenuous logic yet the whole thing hangs together somehow. there are 3 long poems plus a bunch of short ones. all of them are fascinating and interesting. because I'm a dunce at poetry I didn't get as much as I probably should out of all them but I want to return to it later and reread and think about all the ideas again and think about the logic and give each idea a lot of attention and idk it's just. really clever and fascinating and imaginative and feels like a glimpse into a whole new world of something
lelex's review against another edition
4.0
I have no idea what was happening in most of this but I still loved absolutely every second of it. I liked The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace and The Quickening a lot mostly due to how they felt like weird, surreal short stories and also The Mouth of the Anthill is Learning to Write.
"In the desert, there are round splashes of glass where meteorites struck the sand. She goes window-gathering there."
"In the desert, there are round splashes of glass where meteorites struck the sand. She goes window-gathering there."
kjboldon's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
3.0
Super weird poetry, Lockwood is amazing at clever visual and wordplay. But in the opening sequence, I found that cleverness became tiring. I enjoyed the boy inside the whale sequence, but I think Lockwood's poetry, while intellectually interesting, doesn't frequently connect with me on a deeper level.
jheinemann287's review against another edition
2.0
This was my poem-a-day read for May, and as someone who adores Patricia Lockwood's 2017 memoir Priestdaddy and her 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, I WANTED to enjoy this collection. Sadly, I mostly found it to be tedious and pretentious. Many of the poems are about how characters exist doubly in their fictional world and also in the literal world as marks on piece of paper, and I guess that she's trying to say something moving about the narratives we piece together to make sense of our own lives, but any coherent message is too buried to find in these exhaustingly meta poems.
And again, this is coming from someone who will probably read everything Patricia Lockwood ever writes. No one can say she isn't brilliant.
Favorites:
"The Construction of a Forest for the Stage"
And again, this is coming from someone who will probably read everything Patricia Lockwood ever writes. No one can say she isn't brilliant.
Favorites:
"The Construction of a Forest for the Stage"
They say, "You see bright beetles," and the people"The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation"
are forced to picture them: they break out into life
like beads on their upper lips, or gather themselves
like blood along a cut, or button themselves into the world
and then, in order to die, pop violently off the belly
of a third-row man in a black tuxedo. (52)
Tonight is dress rehearsal;"Children with Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads"
the horse shakes a hand heartily inside itself
and wishes itself good luck. "Are you galloping
hard in all your parts?" the front half asks the back,
and they take their first step forward, powered
with plunging stomachs.
Silence. "Who will make our Clop-Clop noise?"
the back half asks the front (54)
and the deeper we go the more we are the diamonds,
surrounded by sharp intakes of breath. Long years of breathing
the air down here have given us lung complaints: if sea stars are
all lung and tarantulas have four lungs, how can two be enough
for a Walking-Talking? Yet two is enough and two is a fact;
we cough and feel stabbing pains, we feel our own pickaxes
strike down inside us and pry up our chunks out pink
quartz, and we spit. (78)
barrypierce's review against another edition
3.0
Lockwood at her best is as complex as Ashbery and as joyous as O'Hara.