Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals

Praise

SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The Strand * Barnes & Noble * BuzzFeed * Flavorwire

“[In Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals] the weirdness almost always carries a magnificent, and political, point. If sexual and social norms make some of us (especially the young) feel monstrous, out of place, unheard, unprotected or out of control, then Lockwood will speak for the monsters . . . Like the best stand-up comics, Lockwood seeks honesty, an honesty inseparable (for her) from the jarring, the awkward, the malformed, the disconcerting, from the tones and topics (especially sexual ones) usually excluded from polite company . . . Lockwood is not the first American poet to combine feminism with shock value, and both with digital-era caricature […] but she is the first to incorporate such a gift for storytelling, and to get it so right . . . She 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 almost all the people who do.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] fantastically weird little book that makes funny and creepy almost-fables out of sex and gender and the business of writing . . . left me crying on the subway.” —The Cut

“[Lockwood is] bolder, more sure of herself, than you are, and she has a genius for writing in the language of vulgar misogyny as she speaks to its absurdity.” —The New Yorker

“In Lockwood’s world, the rules, roles, and requisites of sex, gender, and power have generously stretched their jurisdiction to preside over everything from the deepest reaches of nature to the most American pockets of pop culture . . . her lines feel fresh but footed, with the studious curiosity of Marianne Moore, breathless adventures in anaphora that conjure Anne Waldman slapping ‘Makeup on Empty Space,’ and the slightly sinister laugh lines so deftly deployed by young poets like Chelsey Minnis and Dorothea Lasky . . . The context is conquest, and Lockwood doesn’t so much turn the tables as flip the whole house upside down.” —The Boston Globe


“Lockwood’s outrageous poems transport the reader into a world overflowing with hyper-sexualized and twisted humor . . . Within the seemingly light humor Lockwood unfolds troubled realities of the present moment . . . Her seemingly supernatural material becomes miraculously accepted as natural, as each poem takes us further into a bizarre world, and the reader is struck with lines of poignancy, importance, and depth. We are able to see into the poet’s intricate and introspective mind, which means being confronted with outlandish images and comminglings of humans, animals, and nature. Lockwood’s poems portray the creativity and adventurous nature of our present epoch, inventing what seem to be modern-day tall-tales.” —New Orleans Review
“[Lockwood] delights in the absurdity of her materials, turning the spectacle up to 11 while she lets its component parts slip loose . . . For the nimble, the skeptical, and the restless, writing like this represents a way to be in a country whose failures seem to them as much aesthetic as they are ethical . . . Lockwood’s poems are […] a place made of the mind’s freedom to move through [the culture] on its own outrageous, occasionally indifferent, improvisatory terms.” —Slate


“Fiercely smart and aching with imagination . . . Lockwood’s poems register the full force of what they deliver and yet admirably refuse to see that as a reason to back away.” —Publishers Weekly