I imagine people who like Muumuu house writers will like this (is Lockwood a Muumuu house writer?). Maybe I'm just too old for this, even though Lockwood is older than I am. Maybe I just like my poetry to be beautiful and I saw no beauty in this. It's easy to dismiss any creative act with a glib, "but anyone could do that!" I don't think anyone could write these poems, but reading them, I kept wondering, "Was she even trying? Or did she just sit down and free-write whatever came into mind?" At least it was a quick read. I would like to begin by stating as clearly as I can that I am not well qualified to review this or any other collection of poetry. I seldom read poetry at all, and still less any written in, say, the last 50 years, so I have no good frame of reference to compare it to. I bought it mainly because Amber Earnest kept retweeting its author, and that seemed like a good endorsement. I had also read the poem “Rape Joke,” which is part of this collection, and which has been widely and well-reviewed to the point where I am not going to be able to do it justice here other than to agree that it fully merits the praise that it has gotten.Rape Joke is the most hard-hitting and thought-provoking poem in this collection, and I would say that it shares the qualities that make it so powerful with the best of the other poems, among which I would include: List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers, Revealing Nature Photographs, The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer, The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics and several others. In each of these, the author has a meaningful central idea or analogy around which she riffs various ideas and trains of thought, the timing and placement of which she has obviously carefully considered to shock or amuse the reader, as appropriate, and which fit together well. When this same gift for timing and composition is deployed without the shocking central idea, the result can be something like When the World Was Twelve Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt; which is evocative and clear, without being quite so deep or leaving the reader sitting still for a minute, pondering the overall meaning. There are a number of others like this: silly and clever, but without any sense that anything has really been said.To some extent, this kind of variation is to be expected in a collection of poems that were, in part, previously published elsewhere, and may have been intended with different audiences and contexts in mind; this is not one complete epic that is all supposed to go together. It certainly wouldn’t stop me from recommending it wholeheartedly. The only part that is really, unequivocally bad would be the back cover blurbs, which make no damn sense and severely under-sell the contents.
What do You think about Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014)?
There were maybe four poems I liked here. The others I couldn't really make heads or tails of.
—cindy
Poetry of the body. Of course Whitman is the mother of American poetry.
—alabs
