Patricia Lockwood is a contributing editor at the LRB. Her books include two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals; a memoir, Priestdaddy; and a novel, No One Is Talking about This, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, was published in September. She has written for the LRB on subjects including David Foster Wallace, John Updike, the internet, in a piece originally delivered as an LRB Winter Lecture, and meeting the pope. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Piece human, piece hornet, the fury of both, astonishing abs all over it. Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits, his head in the hornet and his head in the hum, and oh he want to sting her. The air he breathes is filled with flying cheerleader parts. Splits flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit, the calm eye of the panty in the centre of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS – how? –...
Patricia Lockwood talks to Joanne O’Leary about how she became possessed by Vladimir Nabokov, what it’s like to read Lolita as a teenage girl, the diagnostic value of Bend Sinister, and her anxiety...
Patricia Lockwood reads her diary about catching and recovering from Covid-19.
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
Patricia Lockwood is a generous writer. She seems incapable of resentment and has a Rabelaisian appreciation for the bawdy. She can describe America’s corporate restaurant chains and their blooming onions...
For all its dirty jokes and baby talk, Priestdaddy is an angry book, and Patricia Lockwood’s use of childhood idiom is a way of exposing the irrationality of institutional authority.
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