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Summer Tales 2022

This guide helps students find fun reading material during the summer session.

About the Author

Patricia Lockwood (born 27 April 1982) is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books.

She is notable for working across and between a variety of genres. In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing. (Source: Wikipedia)

Featured Poem: Jewel Thief Movie

 

" "[…] I had some small

nugget of sense, for once, I was a mind

that understood the light    ...    "

Except from Jewel Thief Story, by Patricia Lockwood   
 


Patricia Lockwood’s most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” speaks powerfully and personally to our theme of contemporary perspectives on trauma; but for a lighter and more accessible sample of her distinctive way with language, try her short poem “Jewel Thief Movie,” from the perspective of a precious gem.

 

Why Should You Read This Poem?

Take your time with the poem; the action and imagery is both vivid and hard to follow, as if refracted like light through a prism! Note how the line breaks tend to fall in the middle of sentences (called “enjambment”), cut into uniform lengths like the facets of a gem.

Patricia Lockwood reads from 'No One is Talking About This'