A review by bibliocyclist
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

4.0

When you choose your next book, do you aim to be jarred?  As you wade through a sea of uncertain terms, do you ask yourself which fresh words, which modified definitions are worth stealing?  What if Ducks, Newburyport were readable?  What if it were good?  Do these sound like the ingredients of a literary feast that you would order?  If so, check out No One Is Talking About This, the spicy post-genre debut novel from celebrated poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.  From the opening line of the opening page, Lockwood tosses you right in with the viscera to an ambiguous linguistic stew.  Is childhood “the place where you sounded like yourself”?  What do we do when “let me go” becomes the order, while “what the body says is No”?  The stew grows into a body of great depths, a Lake Baikal against the vast gray puddles of its lessers.  We tread soupy water, we flail, we sink or swim.  Paddling the page, you believe that Lockwood speaks directly to you, that Lockwood could perhaps be you, if only you were a genius.  We emerge.  We fling ourselves finally onto land, fortunate to have read this book in its time, like a Jazz Age encounter with Jay Gatsby or a party  invitation to the Dalloways’.  Indeed this may be our condensed Ulysses.  Indulge with the intent to savor.