Patricia Lockwood Returns to Poetry After 12 Years

Patricia Lockwood has published her first book of poetry in 12 years, Agate Head / Stone Soup, a collection the Guardian's review calls "charming, whimsical and intimate" and describes as "a gem of a collection."

The book breaks a silence the poet documents herself. In the introduction, Lockwood writes: "For almost a decade … I had not been able to hear it. The poems that I wrote would not end … too much was happening, there was a different kind of attention being paid."

Why did the poems stop?

Lockwood is precise about the block. It was not a lack of desire. The poems simply refused to arrive whole.

She addresses the gap directly in a poem from the collection, From Cave Painting:

And does she still write poems? Not a whole one since I had been ill. Five years. I kept saying I was Doing it privately. So private even I didn't know about it.

The lines carry the comic deflection and sudden wound that define her voice: an excuse made in public, then quietly dismantled.

What changed in the intervening years?

The period of silence coincided with Lockwood's rise from "interesting US poet" to, in the Guardian reviewer's phrase, "literary superstar." She first drew wide attention with the 2013 viral poem Rape Joke. She then became an acclaimed memoirist and novelist.

The reviewer characterizes her freewheeling, antic style as, for many readers, "the internet's maelstrom lassoed and put back on to the page." The review asks, rhetorically, who else can claim to have turned an audience with the pope into a biting comic essay.

The new collection draws its inspiration from stones and metals, according to the review's summary — a mineral imagery that gives the book its title and its textures.

What does the return mean?

The collection marks a poet relearning how to hear, in her own words, after years in which "too much was happening." For a writer whose prose absorbed the internet's chaos, the move back to verse suggests a recalibration of attention itself.

Readers can judge whether the poems end now — and how — in Agate Head / Stone Soup, which the Guardian reviews under the headline "a gem of a collection."