WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

After 3000 year old poems we’re jumping into the right now favorite. Not too often do I read something buzzy that just came out, but I really like Lockwood’s last book and I was excited to get my hands on this one. It took a second to reserve it from the library, this volume is proving popular. And I can see why. Lockwood’s last volume did about as well as anything I’ve personally come across in rendering in prose the feeling of thinking online. The way that Virginia Wolfe, James Joyce and others at the turn of the last century were able to get down on paper something that really reads the way thinking feels, Lockwood is able to do that but updated for our modern era where everyone is online constantly. She’s able to render what being very online feels like, not knowing where the internet ends and your thinking begins. Lockwood takes that up a notch in this book, where she adds in what the lockdown and then long COVID. And the “vibe” for lack of a better word, is much more vital than the actual narrative. She uses the term, “poetic logic” instead of vibe but the book sums itself up nicely when she writes, “The line of poetic logic, I explained to the students, is as easy to disrupt as the narrative; is the narrative, where none appears to exist.” In fact, the narrative itself seems to be pretty autobiographical or memorish. My understanding is that Lockwood does have long COVID and her sister had a baby who died. The book, when it’s “about” anything, is mostly about these events. But it rambles and goes off in strange places, there’s a long digression about Anna Karenina, for instance, but it always seems to circle back to what the lockdown and grief and covid did to our brains. It’s very personal, there’s not a lot of big, cultural effects charted. The sort of strange tone it uses, one that really seems closer to poetry than prose, had me thinking of Anne Carson, who Lockwood actually mentions at length in the book.  She doesn’t have Carson’s deep understanding of etymology and Greek mythology, though, at one point she even writes, “Could I have learned Greek?” But she’s a worthy heir. And much more modern, in the sense that she is actually trying to say something about the right-now present, which I appreciate. I do wish she’d gone a little bigger on the COVID stuff, I feel like we’ve really memory-holed it as a society and I do wonder how long it will take for artists to try to tackle this period (so far we basically only have Eddington, which I love). Maybe the kids who lived through Lockdown school need to grow up, we’ll see. But overall, she’s such a good and unique writer, I’m interested in whatever she’s writing.