Coming soon: October 6, 2026! American Library in Paris Writer-in-Residence Patricia Lockwood’s poetry book, Agate Head / Stone Soup will be published by Penguin Poets.
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.