RaveThe RumpusAnd for my reading, and for all the poems in this book that make reference to sex, I would say these are sexual poems. Sexual, like the rhythms of sex, the sometimes repeating and sometimes varying rhythms of sex, inside your head there is blood rushing around during sex making other rhythms of sex. When you read Patricia Lockwood’s poems this is what you’ll be feeling ... So goes the speaker in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexual, who wants and then wants to want more if only to make wanting to want more like a trajectory that keeps drawing itself out even while we think that just wanting something will supposedly make it ours. It turns out wanting is another of those porous words. All of this sounds so uncomfortable. It is!
Mary Szybist
RaveThe RumpusMary Szybist speaks with such yearning for Mary’s divine conception. But she is also Mary, a 39-year-old woman \'…who has become one of those childless women who reads too much about the death of children\' (from \'To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary\'). The job of a 21st Century poet, like Carl Phillips, like Mary Szybist is to make illogical logics like faith natural, not just divine ... Szybist artfully reconciles the legend of the Annunciation with our contemporary culture ... sophisticated, wry, faithful, divine, contradictory, tragic and allusive.
