’Motherland’: Where wild spirits make a home

“Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin Poets, 66 pgs., $20)

Patricia Lockwood’s sexy, surreal and mostly sublime poems seem to have been, as James Joyce said in “Ulysses” about a batch of folk tales, “printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.” They scatter lightning and lawn debris across your psyche.

Lockwood, 32, is a poet who was born in a trailer in the Midwest. She never went to college. She’s found an ardent audience on Twitter, where she dispenses mischievous “sexts” as if from an eyedropper.

Last year, one of her poems, an extraordinary piece of writing called “Rape Joke,” first printed on the website The Awl, began to be passed around. It quickly became the least insipid thing to ever receive 100,000 likes on Facebook. It’s hardly too late for you to like it, too.

As is true of all of Lockwood’s work, “Rape Joke” is slippery; its mental freight is elusive. It’s a satirical work that nonetheless brings your heart up under your ears. It begins:

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

This poem moves onward for five more pages, with nary a misstep. It’s a sustained performance that blends awful utterance (“The rape joke is that you were facedown”) with riddling wit. The author interrogates the limits of language, and walks you quite far out on the plank and intentionally leaves you hovering.

Can you end a poem like this one by summoning up the Beach Boys? This writer can.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you “Pet Sounds.” No really.

“Pet Sounds.” He said he was sorry and then he gave you “Pet Sounds.”

Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.

“Rape Joke” is the centerpiece of Lockwood’s second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.” The author’s first collection, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” was published in 2012.

The first thing to know about “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” is that it contains a lot of zoombinating, to borrow Harold Bloom’s favorite term for sex. People get it on; so do animals; so do inanimate objects.

If you can’t find a partner, Elvis said, use a wooden chair. Today the pent-up have streaming pornography, and one of Lockwood’s great gifts as a poet is her ability both to subvert and to revel in porn’s stock language and images.

Most of her best lines are wildly unprintable here. But in a poem titled “Revealing Nature Photographs,” woodlands transmogrify into a peep show: “nature is big into bloodplay,/nature is into extreme age play,” she writes.

The poem continues: “nature is hot/young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes/for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars.” Then: “nature is completely obsessed with twins.” It’s a jungle out there, she reports, so you might as well grab a vine. In another poem, about cheerleaders, Lockwood zeroes in on “the calm eye of the panty in the center/of the cartwheel.”

There’s some Lydia Davis and some Regina Spektor in Lockwood’s verse, some Stevie Smith and some Stevie Nicks. When her poems miss, which they frequently do, their ideas seem larval and merely cute.

When her poems hit, however, they land hard, from unexpected angles. A poem titled “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” opens like this:

First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only

with oil, no one knows how; then there was

Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield

put men back together; and then there was Rose

of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s

clothes and walked out of the house and herself.

The indelible, dreamlike details continue to fall like snow. These soldiers “passed/the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches/together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,/what a bunch of girls.”

The little hairs on my back rose often while reading “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” as if it were the year of the big wind. That’s biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake.