Patricia Lockwood is a contributing editor at the LRB. Her books include three poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Agate Head/Stone Soup, due in October; 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 2025. 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.
I read an article in a library in DublinAbout the Neo-Mineralists –Artists, sculptors who were creating new gems.Well, we had done it before.Leland Blue, Bridewell, Victoria stone.So much car paint had poured up in DetroitThat we gave a name to it: Fordite.
There is also Rosarita,Red as a heart, which is a by-productIn the smelting of gold. It is a breakingly clearGlass. There is gold in...
Halfway through Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine, a young singer called Thea Kronborg, travels to the Southwest and takes for herself a little rock room among the cliff dwellings. She is accompanied by her soon-to-be-lover Fred Ottenburg – wealthy and secretly married – but the purpose of the pilgrimage is to be alone, to think and to strengthen her...
I’m glad he’s gone my father said.But that was the beginningOf my obsession with garnets.
He did cure my husband in the end,Just as I had jokingly wishedHoped requested. Begged,Prayed even. Haha but what if.
The pope thought I was pregnant,He blessed my belly. I smiled in the pictureAnd looked exactly like McLovin,Anyone could have seen what I actuallyWas – great celestial...
Isaw the end of it then, I mean the end of it as it was, as my mother told the story of my father’s sudden deafness. The turn towards the deer in the snow, two pairs of black eyes, the earplugs falling out soundlessly, the shot – then the line on his hearing chart falling off a cliff at a thousand decibels.
It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the...
Aseries of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring....
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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