Agate Head / Stone Soup

A new collection of poetry from Booker Prize finalist Patricia Lockwood, FINALLY! "A modern word witch." —The New York Times Book Review Many have called Patricia Lockwood a wordsmith, but in the latest iteration of her life, she has become, quite literally, a metalsmith too. Stones, gems, metals, fossils—she forges them into bodies, faces, and, with her typical irreverence, vaginas. In these poems, a robot dog discovers the Lascaux caves in France. Jane Austen shoots a perfect game. A rock gets a girlfriend. The Pope blesses McLovin (kind of). Lockwood's most indelible work of metal- and word-smithing yet is her blend of the Internet world with the natural one, as she sifts meme references and literary echoes into evocations of geological time, explorations of organic bodies, and observations of youth. Both personal and provocative, Agate Head / Stone Soup brings together the intimacy of Lockwood's memoir, the incisiveness of her criticism, the power of her fiction, and the mad genius of her poetry in an ambitious artistic masterpiece served in two slices.

Patricia Lockwood is the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize-winning novel No One Is Talking About This, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the past 100 years. Her other books include the memoir Priestdaddy, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, the novel Will There Ever be Another You, and two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.