patricia lockwood

I came across this piece by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books, "The Communal Mind," and it is blowing my little mind. I've not finished it yet because it's long and I'm at work, but holy crap. I was vaguely aware of her poetry and online presence -- the title of her collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is hard to forget -- but now I'm dying to read more of it. This prose poetry, whatever it is, in the LRB piece, is about the experience of living a life that's connected inextricably to the internet. I think a lot about my own compulsive clicking and scrolling, worry about it in a vague way, occasionally make efforts to reduce screen time. I am, luckily, not a terribly compulsive person, so I don't think I have it as bad as some. But no one has ever crystallized the experience of living online like this, at least not that I've read.

A sample:

The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.

Why were her lungs so shallow after three or four hours of it, and her pulse like a rabbit’s, its whole body full of the thought what’s there, what’s next, what is that wind? And blood, do I smell blood?

Was there even a gloaming any more, or had the computers eaten it?
And had there always been this many mystery blobs washing up on seashores, or was it new?

A picture of a species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, ‘It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.’

me
me
unbelievably me
it me