Patricia Lockwood’s Inexhaustible Mind

"People were writing poems," Patricia Lockwood tells us. Also: "People brought you cabbages." In her hands, events don't unfold in the usual way, with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, we seem to come upon people and things doing what they always do, their actions and goings on both a matter of course and an incorrigible fact of their existence. The sensation of duration and repetition accumulates and compounds, so that the feeling is that this, whatever it is, has been going on forever.

In a similar way, you could say people were reading Patricia Lockwood. She arrived on the literary scene, some 15 years or so ago, apparently fully-formed, blurring at the edges slightly and yet for that all the more identifiable as herself. Her poetry, her uncanny ability to post viral tweets—back when that meant something, though no one had any idea what—her immediately recognizable prose style, all that having the feeling not so much of promise but fulfillment, an IOU from the culture to itself, finally being paid.