First published 2012
Patricia Lockwood creates a poetry collection where the titles themselves tell entire stories. Her poems inhabit a world where cartoon mothers build houses in impossible spaces, where children have lamps streaming from their heads, and where someone can be killed with a kitchen tool and still ask questions about identity. The front and back halves of horses hold conversations. Clean squares of paper mark where pictures once hung on walls. Each poem title stretches into its own miniature narrative, creating riddles that blur the line between the mundane and the impossible. Lockwood builds a universe where everyday objects become weapons, where domestic spaces transform into surreal landscapes, and where the act of naming something becomes an act of creation. These poems live in the space between humor and violence, between the familiar and the strange, where a simple kitchen implement can become the subject of existential questioning.
Genres: contemporary, poetry, 21st-century, surreal
Vibes: intimate, thought-provoking, whimsical
Tropes: mundane-to-impossible, surreal
87 pages · Paperback · Octopus Books
Content warnings: violence