Poet on the Edge

If the number of bullyboys, bootlickers, power nerds, language goons, and slithering propagandists in society remains more or less constant, inflammations and outbreaks notwithstanding, then so—thank God—does the number of poets. And while the former, breathing heavily, go about their work of flattening and coarsening the imagination, the latter are helplessly dedicated to its renewal. They’re more fragile, of course, the poets; seething with nervous debility, in fact. That’s the point of being a poet. And they get paid less, a lot less. But they have reality on their side: Reality desires to have poems written about it, not hack verbiage or ideological jingles, and so gives the poets its best material.

Patricia Lockwood is an American poet whose prismatically witty, sexually slippery, polymorphous, and Millennially mischievous poetry—like the internet talking in its sleep—has