The New Yorker Excerpts Poet Patricia Lockwood's New Novel

Poet Patricia Lockwood's debut novel, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead, February), is excerpted in the new issue of the New Yorker. There's still plenty of poetry in these fragments: "The question that was the pure, liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped‐clock answer," she writes. More:

…She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up until the very last minute, to require her perpetual co‐writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain‐wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once Photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, Oh, have I been wasting my time?

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“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had been just a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz. Her mother laid her head against the steering wheel and began to weep.

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The strange and sideways uses to which art is put! She stood in the hospital dark beside her sister, holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of bleached hair back from her forehead. Her sister’s husband rocked back and forth on his heels, boyish in basketball shorts and flip‐flops, unable to stand still. The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach until a huge womph of heart filled the room, red‐black and fuzzed at the edges, somehow functioning. They were waiting for the baby to move her diaphragm, the tech explained, in and out, in and out. This would show that her body was learning how to breathe. The tech watched and watched, pressing the wand so hard that her sister cried. On the monitor a small everything swam and bulged; it was impossible to look at the gray-and-black wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space.…

Please read on at the New Yorker.