Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals

by Patricia Lockwood

Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Fiction, 21st Century, LGBT, Queer, Womens

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 27, 2014

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's what I suggest: Look this book of poetry over, then read Adam Plunkett's May 29th review, "Patricia Lockwood's Crowd-Pleasing Poetry", at www.newyorker.com, then read the comments below that, then read: Mallory Ortburg's "How Not to Review Women's Writing" at

http://the-toast.net/2014/06/02/how-n...

... then read Joanna Russ's 1968 How to Suppress Women's Writing, then refer to #Yesallwomen, then read some Angela Carter and Gertrude Stein and some short stories by Borges and some poetry by G.M. Hopkins, then go back to the book, read it again, then come and we'll hang out.

We'll walk south along the Potomac towards Hains Point and look at the dying fish and the crazy Canada geese who don't know where they are supposed to be and we'll drink Gin and Tonics and talk. We'll talk, darling. Oh yes, there will be plenty to talk about.

... This book makes me so happy. I finished it. Stewed a bit. Talked about it. Went back to it. Got happy. Added an extra star. Thinking about opening it again....

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Who is not an atheist about Emily Dickinson's body, which is
totally unbelievable."

Reading this poetry collection on an October morning in an anonymous café, I have a feeling of past, present and future meeting for a brief moment. It is all there - the classical erudition, woven into the strange postmodernist reality we have created for ourselves, and an outlook on even stranger time-in-space encounters in a bleak or sunny future.

In the quest for a newborn Gary, Lockwood looks at the aging of a name, once fashionable and vital, now on the verge of disappearing into old age. But there is hope for future Garys. For isn't it just at the moment when something is absolutely, completely out of fashion that it gets interesting and exotic again? Who knows? Maybe Gary will be the name of the year 2025?

I found it rather unbelievable - even more unbelievable than the body of Emily Dickinson - to imagine that Rape Joke was written before #MeToo. It was though.

"The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about
the rape in it."

What I wonder is whether it happened if he didn't? Or whether this poem makes it real?

Probably not. It is just the truth. And a truth that the narrator will be reduced to, according to the logic of rape jokes. Write Rape Joke, and it becomes You.

Patricia Lockwood writes to the point, and around and above and beneath the point as well. She writes. Period. Poetry. Postmodernist Poetry. And I liked it. A lot. How likely was that? Does it matter, as long as it happened?

Read it!

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after giving birth to American Poetry."

Okay, maybe this quote doesn't particularly represent Patricia Lockwood's poetry (or does it?)—I just thought it was funny, and to be completely fair it's pretty much impossible to pull a line or two from Patricia Lockwood's poetry and make it stand in for the whole. This is some of the densest, most intense poetry I've ever read. In each poem all of the lines interlock, fitting together like puzzle pieces, and separating one or two from the whole would be just as meaningless as trying to extrapolate the Golden Gate Bridge from two random pieces of blue water. The themes, some collision of nature and sex and national identity, are bewildering and engrossing and offer a great snapshot of Lockwood's clearly strange yet astounding mind. It's also somehow really funny. And it's totally contemporary and up-to-the-minute, but also so rigorous it makes most other poets look like they're just playing around. This is a type of poetry I never thought I would ever find but I'm so happy I have. Patricia Lockwood. Who knew?

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

lockwood's no one is talking about this and priestdaddy are two of my favorite reads of the year, so i was hoping to adore her poetry as well. i can recognize her biting humor and her skill with words, but much of this book went over my head! it's intense and clever and strange, and made me wish i were wiser.

"rape joke," lockwood's most well-known poem, is incendiary and wonderful. i also really liked "he marries the stuffed-owl exhibit at the indiana welcome center," "the fake tears of shirley temple," and "natural dialogue grows in the woods."

here's my favorite, "there were no new colors for years":

Before neon came along, was made, did not grow
like the rest of the colors, or grew as a tumorous
growth on Art
wherever the sun touched it too much,
and we went to see that tumour in museums
whenever our parents would take us
and brought replicas home from the gift
shop - before neon there wasn't a way
to buy plastic packs of plastic stars and put
the Big Dipper on your ceiling,
no way to put stars on your ceiling at all
unless you went outside and slept there
which we stopped dong years before
when all adults woke up and wanted
to touch a firm camper between the legs -
it was a new kind of fruit like the maraschino
and they craved it every minute of the day -
so we stayed indoors and reflected the glow and
all adults were jealous, they turned old-timey shades
of green and they hated our head-to-toe neon,
because:
the names were the same just
with NEON before them like colors woke freshly
divorced
and demanded that people call them Ms.,
this made parents uncomfortable and sexually helpless,
they pictured nipples like eyes on stalks, they thought
why was I born too late, and thought how much scarier
it would have been when Orson Welles lied about aliens
if they'd been able to see neon
in their minds back then, and they banged the doors
angry on their sleeping children, no doubt dreaming
neon dreams that would have killed the parents
with how scary they were, so hard the biggest stars
fell down
and fell into our mouths, and we woke
in the morning tasting them, and the stars tasted
toxic and perfectly new.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no experience with Patricia Lockwood's poems until now. Poems are what these are called; I assure you I did not make this up. Yet, they feel like short stories.

There are 31 poems in this collection.
The paperback is only 66 pages long.
The cover looks like a bad dream one can't wait to wake from.

Starting out strong...
At least the first 3 or 4 poems are close to brilliant...in an extremely creative -shocking-mind-twisty-way.
Once I got pass "Lizard Vagina", Canada....and Bambi...( every deer gets called Bambi once in its life), and "He marries the Stuff-Owl Exhibit.......
My ear was trained and ready for more quirky-Lookwood- poems...

But when I read RAPE JOKE....I was completely blown away! WOW! I later learned I could have read this one for 'free".... apparently it's Patricia Lockwood's signature-poem of degrees.
It's really worth reading...yet, I'm glad I spent the few extra dollars for the entire collection.

"An Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World", "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers",
"The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple"...are all standouts.
But...I think my very favorite ( next to RAPE JOKE), is "The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics".

Incongruous at times....a good resource to get the creative juices flowing!
Patricia Lockwood's energy is contagious!

HAPPY 2016!

[Arie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really should have liked this more, I just... didn't.

"Liked" is the wrong word - these poems should have captured me, bewildered me in all the right ways, dazed me with clever wordplay and broken my heart in all the heartbreaking rawness of it all.

They didn't.

Instead (and this is awful), I kept imagining this:



(Which is when Gayle read her poems on Bob's Burgers and it made a mockery of bad poetry readings)

And this, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals isn't even bad poetry, exactly, it just... wasn't great, I didn't think. Moments were, and then the moments were lost again and I could not focus on the words.

Just really not for me.

[Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

                             The hornet begins to fly
toward the cheerleaders. "Make me
the point of your pyramid," he breathes.
And they take him up in the air with them
and mix and match his parts with theirs,
and all come down with one gold stripe,
and come down sharp and stunned,
and lie on the ground a minute, all think-
ing am I dead yet, where am I, did we win.

I'll readily admit that a lot of this went over my head. Or maybe not even over my head exactly, but around, through... my head was involved and the poems were involved but it was like that part in Interstellar where the guy is in the fourth dimension or whatever and trying to communicate with his daughter across space and time. You forget sometimes that language alone can blow your mind like that, but it can.

If you've read one poem from this collection it's probably "Rape Joke," and that's because "Rape Joke" is absolutely devastating and necessary and completely deserving of the attention it got a few years back. But stylistically that poem is a lot different from most of the other selections here, which make use of a totally bizarre, intimate, explicit, hilarious medley of components that tidy tags like "surreal" or "absurdist" or "satirical" don't even begin to describe. She's writing about Walt Whitman's gigantic breasts or comparing mother nature itself to hardcore porn, and it's kinda conversational but also really experimental, and it's joyfully profane but also sweet and almost sort of devotional too (spot the Gerard Manley Hopkins homage in this one), and it makes you want to laugh and it makes you want to cry and and and... you really just have to read it to understand. It's the kind of poetry that changes the way you think. It's the kind of poetry that changes the shape of your thoughts themselves.

The best way I can think of to sum it up is to say that these poems embody the sheer weirdness and exuberance and iconoclasm of the internet itself (Paul Constant at The Stranger called this collection "the first true book of poetry to be published in the 21st century," which you can agree with or dispute as desired), so it's appropriate that Lockwood first developed a following on Twitter. An older or smugger reader might point to that fact with scorn—oh, she's a Twitter poet—but as a child of the internet age, pretty much an internet addict from the start, I think it's awesome. And even more awesome, Lockwood hails from the Midwest and doesn't have an academic degree. That never happens in the lit world anymore.

I don't really know what else to say, and Lockwood doesn't need yet another man's review anyway. I'll finish by repeating that this is really good. Unsettling? Sure. Hard to comprehend? At times. But if you just wade right in and trust the words to keep you afloat, I think you'll come out both undrowned and happy that you did.

[Vartika · Rating 5 out of 5]

To think I almost passed this collection by. To think I looked at the title, looked over it, nearly overlooked it with my skim eye. But something catches. Something pulls. You know Patricia Lockwood has a knack for it.

This was incredible poetry—weird, rude, heart-rending, poignant, downright bizarre, and rip-roaringly hilarious; poems about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman's tit-pics, Niagara Falls getting drunk, a man marrying a stuffed owl, and Bambi doing pornography together between the covers with those on heartbreak, sexism, sexual assault (the viral and brilliant "Rape Joke"), and The Feeling of Needing a Pen. Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.

I drank each poem with delight, even the ones I didn't get, the more stream-of-consciousness ones, I guzzled them all down to each final line break, and then again till the ball rolling at the end of each poem's end was in my mouth, and I sucked on the silence at the end of each poem like cool, hard candy, and often choked
with out-loud laughter.
They were funny and witty and complex, very differently so from the only other time I've used these descriptors (for some long-absolved, easily-dissolved, pre-adolescent crush), except this time I mean it. My favourites, aside from the ones I have already mentioned, were "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers", "Natural Dialogue Grows in the Woods", "The Arch", and "The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks".

I would recommend them all highly, especially if you like postmodernism stirred into your shot of poetry—you'll know Patricia Lockwood has a knack for it.

[johnny ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

yo maybe i’m just drunk but this collection of poetry was absolute gas.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the father and mother of American poetry are back from the dead for just one day. They are standing up out of their graves, turning to each other, exchanging their tit-pics!

Not sure if I'm correct in doing this but I laughed a lot at this poetry, some of it is soooooooooo rude, I had to leave the room to giggle otherwise I would have to explain my laughter to my kids. Bambi doing porn and a poem showing just how dirty nature can be were brilliantly funny. The rape joke was one of the darkest poems I've ever read, so well written. But for me "the father and mother of American Tit-Pics" was my favourite, very clever stuff.

I've not heard of Patricia Lockwood before, it was the cover and title that attracted the book to me, glad I gave it a go.

Blog post is here> https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2018...

[somuchreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

Αυτό το βιβλίο των λιγότερων από 70 σελίδων το πηγαινοφέρνω στο κινητό από το οποίο διαβάζω τα ebooks μου εδώ και μήνες. Το ξεκίνησα τον Μάιο, το τελείωσα τον Ιούλιο, το ξανάπιασα από την αρχή τον Σεπτέμβριο και το τελείωσα για 2η φορά τον Δεκέμβριο. Και ξέρετε κάτι; Πολύ καλά έκανα.

Η ποίηση της Patricia Lockwood δεν είναι η ποίηση που έχω συνηθίσει [να βαριέμαι] τόσα χρόνια. Είναι μια ποίηση που μοιάζει λίγο σαν αυτόματη γραφή και λίγο σαν ωμή καταγραφή σκέψεων της συγγραφέα του. Σκληρή, άβολη, εντελώς προσβλητική, η Lockwood θα σε σοκάρει και θα σε κάνει να γελάσεις και αυτή τη μίξη εγώ τη βρίσκω σπουδαία.

Φυσικά ένα τέτοιο έργο θα εκνευρίσει πολύ κόσμο, μάλλον περισσότερο από όσους το αγαπήσουν. Αλλά η δική μου οπτική απέναντι στην τέχνη, όποια τέχνη, είναι πως τα έργα που διχάζουν τόσο πολύ είναι κι αυτά που αξίζει κανείς να ασχοληθεί μαζί τους. Ακόμα κι αν στο τέλος σε κάνουν να βγάζεις καπνούς από τα αφτιά. Ή μάλλον, ακριβώς για αυτό το λόγο.

Το Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals είναι, όπως είδα και μια κριτική πολύ σωστά να γράφει εδώ στο Goodreads, "very American, very heterosexual and completely out of my reach". Ζήτω.

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals: ★★★½

[Shawnte Orion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since the poem Rape Joke went viral and was read by an estimated 100,000 people (rightfully so), this book felt somewhat like the record you buy after hearing the brilliant lead single. It's understandably difficult for the rest of the album to sustain your expectations.

There is a focus and clarity to Rape Joke that I found myself missing during some of the more stream-of-consciousness poems. But there are still plenty of other high points like The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple, List Of Cross-Dressing Soldiers, Revealing Nature Photographs, Nessie Wants To Watch Herself Doing It.

I doubt anybody consistently writes better titles than Lockwood.

I had to up this rating, after returning to it months later when my expectations were more reasonable. I was choosing books to give out at my annual Contemporary Poetry White Elephant Gift Exchange and I was excited to share this one.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. I prefer vodka!

[Miglė · Rating 3 out of 5]

Būna poezijos, kur paveikia kažkaip iš esmės ir ilgam. O būna poezijos, kurios poveikis stiprus, bet trumpas - kaip tų vadinamųjų eterių. Ši knyga man būtų iš tų pastarųjų. Sėdi, skaitai troleibuse, tada pakeli akis ir porą sekundžių dar veikia tas autorės sukurtas "filtras", kur visi yra keisti, trapūs ir žiaurūs gyvūnų / žmonių hibridai. Paskui išlipi, paeini porą žingsnių ir praeina, eilutės galvoje neskamba - na, skamba viena:

"A-Z animals hunger for learning. They hunger
for learning, you sneak them to school. A mouse
in your pocket a frog in your pocket. They talk
or you think they can talk. (...)"

bet gal dėl to įstrigo, kad kažkaip priminė Bruno K. Öijerio (cituoju iš atminties, tai nepykit, jei netiksliai):

"Sužeisti namai prašo globos, jie paguldomi mano akysna.
Sužeistos pelės prašo globos, jos paguldomos mano akysna, gydomos.
Sužeistos tarnaitės prašo globos, jos paguldomos mano akysna, gydomos.

Vieniši eina ten, kur visi vieniši išėjo."

Bet grįžtant prie "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals".
Dėmesį pirmiausia patraukė viršelis (beje, kurtas nuostabiosios Lisa'os Hanawalt) ir pavadinimas - puikus pavadinimas, ir kitų eilėraščių pavadinimai puikūs: "Bedbugs Conspire to Keep me from Greatness", "The Whole World Gets Together and gangbangs a Deer" etc.
Kaip ir atrodo iš pavadinimų, eilėraščiai šmaikštūs, seksualūs ir su kažkokiu už jų slypinčiu neįvardintu baisumu. Iš visų išsiskiria "Rape Joke", labai išpažintinis, labai paveikus, labai gerai vertinamas.
Bet, kaip sakoma ir pačiame eilėraštyje,
"The rape joke ir if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're
asking for it to become the only thing people remember
about you."
o biškį gaila, nes ir kiti eilėraščiai geri, išmoningi etc - skaitydama galvojau, kad labai amerikietiški, nors nežinau tiksliai, kas ta amerikietiška poezija. Egzotiškai amerikietiški, susiję su žmogaus brendimu, dažnai skausmingu, lyčių stereotipais, meilės trūkumu ar jos pakaitalais.

[Ant · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had really high expectations for this book of poetry, it was going to be clever and shocking. I was really disappointed that I found it to be neither. It reminded me of listening to a clever teenager trying to sound jaded or be shocking without the depth of experience to avoid being trite.
I will freely admit I spent very little time with this work, because it failed to please me or hold my attention in any way. So I am not saying the work has no merit, just that I didn't like it.

[Jennie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got to "The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer" and gave up.

I feel like the title hooks are there to attract your attention but the poetry is not my cup of tea.

[Loranne Davelaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erg absurd maar wel op een leuke manier (al kan ik nu nooit meer Walt Whitman of Emily Dickinson lezen zonder aan hun tit-pics te denken)

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I admired Lockwood's collection, I really do. There are some poems that come close to successful, and one ("The Rape Joke") which really hits home. Too many poems seem please with little dirty jokes or attempts at humor. "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" "The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple" and "The Descent of the Dunk" all come close. Too often I feel that what strives to be free and experimental is just undisciplined and needing rewriting.

The main conceit that nations and landscapes are treated as if human bodies and beings, and vice verse, just doesn't work here for me.

Perhaps it is just me. But I really wanted to admire this collection. But as Lockwood might write, "Naaaaaaah."

[randi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant, rough, raw, offensive. This collection of poetry shows what it is like to not give a rat's ass. Patricia Lockwood grabbed my attention, offended me, and made me want to read more...in fact, she kind of made me want to punch someone in the face. This collection of poetry will both disturb and amuse and is an excellent asset to any edgy poet's collection.

[Loretta Riach · Rating 5 out of 5]

hot wicked strong throat punch of beautiful & strange sensations. very very good (maybe especially so if you have found yourself clinically unstable at some point in your life, & now harbour suspicions that mother nature is talking directly to you). also Rape Joke, which everyone talks about, and is still brilliant despite getting talked about so often. sometimes i feel like getting that whole poem as a back tattoo in an ugly script font.

[fantine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This recently Booker shortlisted author absolutely stunned me with this absurd collection which twists through classic American iconography and contemporary culture to explore transformations of all kinds. It is difficult to put into words such unique writing; it’s explicit, intimate, raw, moving, satirical and just straight up weird.
Animorphs as a metaphor for puberty, a man forcibly marries a stuffed owl exhibit, ponderings on the existence of babies named Gary, and the mother and father of American literature (Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman of course) rise from the dead to take tit pics. This collection contains her most known poem ‘Rape Joke’ a profoundly moving piece of writing worthy of all the praise

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection is 1/4 heartrending powerhouse and 3/4 bonkers hilariousness. There are poems about sexual assault and patriarchal culture intermixed between poems about deer doing pornos, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman tit-pics, a sports mascot experiencing ecstasy with the cheerleading squad, and Niagra Falls getting drunk at a wedding. Some of the imagery was difficult for me to follow, which is the case with many of the poetry collections I read, but I absolutely loved this book. Funny, raw, and beautifully written.

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The Father and Mother of American Tit Pics' won my heart.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review from Coldfront: http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/mothe...

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

i should have known better, i really don't like absurdist poetry or poetry that is weird for weirds sake...

[robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

patricia lockwood is weird girl representation <3

anyway i enjoyed this a lot but not quite as much as her fiction. her wit is just as incandescent as ever but i unfortunately suffer from an obnoxious need to feel like i Understand what i'm reading and too much of this went a little too far over my head, no matter how funny and incisive i found other parts of it to be!

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually rate books of poetry, because more so than other books I find the ratings incredibly arbitrary, and I don't trust myself to come up with a rating I trust. But I want to remember that I really enjoyed this one. It's more abstract than most of the poetry I read, while at the same time really corporeal-- blood and guts and sex and modern references. The references are tailor-made for my own experiences and generation, in a lot of ways, children of the late-1980s, wondering about what older generations thought about the invention of neon colors, using Animorphs as a stand-in for puberty (because really, what else could it be), a poem about the Arch in St. Louis. I think my favorite is the extended metaphor "When the World Was Ten Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt," which includes the line "A ten-year-old is made of time, / the world had forever to learn about Egypt." Another favorite is "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" : "Together / with men they were blown free from their pronouns. / Their faces too were shot off which were then / free of their bodies."

I read the Kindle edition (checked out from the library's Overdrive) and so I was constantly second-guessing the formatting, but I enjoyed the poems enough that I'll probably end up purchasing a print copy.

UPDATE: Purchased this at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and re-read this as the first book in my Poetry-Before-Bed tradition/habit, 2016.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is/was/will be important. If you are reading this, read it. It speaks for itself in all kinds of strange ways and will challenge you and upset you and make you put it down and occasionally gasp at moments of clarity in the absurdity and the cartoonishness that approaches near heartbreaking emotional honesty. If you are an intellectual-broey-dude type (e.g., Adam Plunkett of the New Yorker) you will defensively read it out of obligation and feel threatened/insulted and then threaten/insult the intelligence of Lockwood and readers by panning it in your insightful review, but you will mention how "Rape Joke" was actually "really the best poem here," almost as if you missed that part (or didn't REALLY care to read): "The rape joke is that if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're asking/for it to become the only thing people remember about you." There's more here to remember, a lot more.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough to review this. This is one of the few poetry collections I've read since coming to love poetry that I didn't enjoy reading -- even though I enjoyed each of the individual poems I read. I think there's something about Lockwood's work (in the poetic form, anyway) that resists collection in this way, resists being read near each other. I took months to read this collection and probably could've/should've taken even longer. Because what she does on an individual level is fantastic. Go read Rape Joke (https://wordsfortheyear.com/2016/10/0...) and have your understanding of poetry smashed and recoalesced forever, and read all of these poems someday sometime. Maybe just not, you know, together.

[Moon Captain · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get through it. I tried. Twice!
Had a drink and tried again! No use.
I guess I just don't get it. I found it unbearably juvenile..
I dunno, I feel like a dick trying to explain what I didn't like about a book of poetry, so nevermind.
No, you know what? Fuck it:
It reads like an impish tween full of caffeine trying to say the grossest things and shock the monocle right out of an adult's eyesocket. I am absolutely in despair that this book is held in such high regard. What the fuck, America?
Like, I'm glad for the author, she's clearly had some fun with this, but it's not remarkable. Give a kid some coca cola and tell him what sex is and show him how to burn ants with a magnifier and you'll get some rambles out of him akin to this poetry.
SHRUG!!!