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Does fiction still need speech marks? A potted history of vanishing punctuation

The best memoirs of all time including Michelle Obama's Becoming, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Chanel Miller's Know My Name and Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy.

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Reading lists

The best memoirs of all time, as chosen by our readers

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals

'The work of a genuine original ... surreal ... funny ... subversive' Sunday Times 
 
What if a deer did porn? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? And what would Walt Whitman's tit-pics really look like? 
 
Free-wheeling and surreal yet deadly serious, and including the viral hit 'Rape Joke' ('An oblique mini-masterpiece' - Guardian), this book shows one of our most original poets at her virtuosic best. 
 
'Lockwood has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our times and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get' Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review, Books of the Year 
 
'Lockwood should enter the canon forever . . . her lines left me crying on the subway' Kat Stoeffel, The Cut 
 
'The little hairs on my back rose often while reading Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals . . . That's biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake' Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The poems in [this] collection ... are the work of a genuine original. They are surreal, they are funny, they are subversive. They do what poetry is meant to do: they make you look at things in a different way

Prismatically witty, sexually slippery, polymorphous, and Millennially mischievous poetry ... I can see [Lockwood] in my mind, post-religion, post-family, a savvy, wounded poet hanging over an electronic abyss ... Can poetry address the massive and systematic degradation of the mental environment? Lockwood, her personae shimmering, her linguistic sensors tingling, is one of the few poets tough enough and shrewd enough to try

[Lockwood] has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get, a book easy to recommend for people who do not read new poetry often - as well as for people who do.

The little hairs on my back rose often while reading Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals ... That's biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake.

Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. Her debut collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, was released in 2012 by Octopus Books; a selection of her poetry was included in Penguin Modern Poets 2: Controlled Explosions (2016), and her memoir, Priestdaddy, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2017. Her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Tin House and Poetry.

What if a deer did porn? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Do men deserve to be hypnotized for their crimes? And what would the tit-pics of famous dead Americans Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson really look like? Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is the only book that dares to answer these questions - or, at the very least, to come tantalisingly close before dancing mournfully away again, its rump twirling through the artificial night of the last great gorilla actor's costume. 
 
Taking in a philosophically-minded Loch Ness Monster, a younger brother's military tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the autobiographical poem 'Rape Joke', Patricia Lockwood's second collection shows one of today's most original poets at her virtuosic best, combining a free-wheeling and surreal sense of humour on the surface with a deep seriousness and an intricate technical mastery lurking always just below it.

Controlled Explosions

Penguin Modern Poets 2

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment. 
 
"Is it any wonder I've got 
too much blood on my hands? The calls 
are coming from inside the house. 
I'm sick of my insane demands." 
- Michael Robbins, 'Peel Off the Scabs' 
 
". . . The childhood of the dunk 
 was no childhood at all. 
He practiced on a paper route, throwing The Sun 
to the same place each morning. Did not sleep long 
but when he slept, the springs of his bed imparted 
something to him. At night the streetlight floated 
down and let him dribble it." 
- Patricia Lockwood, 'The Descent of the Dunk' 
 
"if my signal drops it's because i've climbed with them, we're so high now 
i can in one single inverted yawn of my eyes full of skin and sex and fury see the whole city i so slowly streetlamp by streetlamp from the other side spent my life seeing in a drowning 
 
"and this one boy here he's doing 
he's doing a painting, it's the last day of august, it's a painting of a bed and" 
- Timothy Thornton, 'Voicemail for David Hoyle'

Two small, sorbet-coloured paperbacks were the most exciting thing in poetry this year. Reviving the 1960s Penguin Modern Poets series with panache, they united new and established voices from Britain and North America in electric pocketfuls

Patricia Lockwood

A Memoir

When the expense of a medical procedure forces the 30-year-old Patricia to move back in with her parents, husband in tow, she must learn to live again with her family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of a childhood spent in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Her father is a gun-toting, all-American, frequently semi-naked priest who underwent a religious conversion after watching The Exorcist 70 times on a Navy submarine; her mother, who emerges as the book's real heart, is a woman preternaturally concerned with the various disasters that could be about to befall her loved ones - and any nearby babies - at all times. Told with a keen comic sensibility that packs a laugh on almost every page, this is at the same time a lyrical and affecting true story of how, having ventured into the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.

Patricia Lockwood

Praise for Priestdaddy

Glorious

Extraordinary

Electric

Glorious

Extraordinary

Electric

Glorious

Extraordinary

Electric

Books by Patricia Lockwood

Articles featuring Patricia Lockwood

Does fiction still need speech marks? A potted history of vanishing punctuation

The best memoirs of all time, as chosen by our readers

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