September 23, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Patricia Lockwood on “Party in the USA” By Patricia Lockwood Photograph courtesy of Patricia Lockwood. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Patricia Lockwood’s “Party in the USA” appears online today. Her poems “Perfect Pussy,” “The Ventifact,” and “Cave Painting” appear in our new Fall issue, no. 253. How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? The genesis of this one is almost comically literal. I was recording the audiobook for my new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, at a studio in Savannah, Georgia, and after my first session the sound engineer told me that Miley Cyrus had recorded “Party in the U.S.A.” in that very booth. (Why not tell me beforehand, so I could call upon her power?) On the second day, when we broke for lunch, I looked at my phone and saw that my sister had texted about an active shooter at the hospital where she works. Nothing makes you feel stupider than having just whipped off your bra in the “Party in the U.S.A.” booth while reading a book about your tiny little life so you can get more air into your idiotic diaphragm than your sister suddenly texting you the words “We’re on lockdown.” Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it? I was. Many details in the poem are taken from Roger Shattuck’s 1980 classic The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, which had been sent to me by NYRB. Read More
September 23, 2025 Poetry Party in the USA By Patricia Lockwood FROM JOSH SMITH’S DINOSAURS, A PORTFOLIO THAT APPEARED IN THE WINTER 2024 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY FARZAD OWRANG, COURTESY OF JOSH SMITH. After a while English departs and you Find yourself in a realm. Like the Wild Boy Reaching for a potato in the mirror. Someone was holding it behind his head. He never stopped to let it cool but made Little cries to indicate it was burning him. Still, it was his favorite food. After an hour Of reading out loud your carefulness Is mere sound, the city you have built Whistles. Between chapters I wrapped up And shivered, did not eat, so I could go on Speaking what seemed the whole language At once: tongue twisters, all observation. “Party in the U.S.A.” was recorded in that booth, Her platinum record hung on the wall. Active shooter in my building, Mary texted, Just as we broke to stretch. Fucking America, We said, and settled in to read the father Chapter. The Wild Boy would be cared for By a priest, later, but first, a school Gardener. Scenery on the way to Paris Did not impress him, he caught a light Case of smallpox, and insisted on having His potato next to him at all times. There are feats that seem impossible Just before and after: 8,000 signatures, Being alive. You cannot think about page Numbers, your hunger, or Baby Peck, Hysterical, trying to climb into your sister’s Desk with a bottle of bourbon, to hide. They are locked down, quiet, texting. Why had it felt so urgent to be heard? Hold on, baby, I said, and Paul: “I once had an RPG shot at me While dancing to ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ ” We waited for word: OK, they got him. And waited for word: I hate it here. “The boy had grown quite fat now, Loved to be tickled, laughed easily, And apparently dreamed while asleep.” They were saddened that he cared only For his own survival, nourishment. You could not die with your potato Next to you, a potato meant one more day. Little clouds breathed out—cry cry!— And there were jagged peaks. Oh, it was all painful, mealy, wonderful. How it contained—hot hot!—all Custom, rivers of butter, green chives Of trees, a gardener who had promised Him a new home if he ever needed one. Patricia Lockwood is the author of five books, including the novel Will There Ever Be Another You.
September 22, 2025 Document “The Abysmal Scum!”: On Not Reading Ayn Rand By Jordan Castro Rand’s signature created in vector format by Scewing, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. A few months ago, as a result of the strange, hazy possession that occurs while sitting in front of the laptop screen, I “found myself”—a phrase I’ve disliked ever since I read a tweet by Elisa Gabbert pointing out its imprecision (although in this case it’s appropriate)—staring at Ayn Rand’s marginalia in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. I’ve never read Ayn Rand, even though I’ve owned a copy of The Fountainhead since I was twenty-two, when my depressed friend moved to the West Coast and left me his book collection. I agree with Walter Benjamin that it’s good to keep a library regardless of whether or not you actually read the books, and so I brought The Fountainhead with me wherever I moved. My friend Megan, while visiting, said she “actually liked” The Fountainhead, and I took great satisfaction in being someone people felt free enough around to confess things like their love of The Fountainhead to. This was 2017—a time when a Fountainhead confession could get you into real trouble. And so The Fountainhead became a kind of litmus test: if, when perusing my book collection, someone mentioned liking The Fountainhead, I felt I could trust them; if they asked in a baffled, catty tone why I had it, I lost a little respect for them, despite my not having read it and still having only a vague sense that certain people didn’t like Ayn Rand because she was a “capitalist.” Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues By Alec Mapes-Frances The Centrale Montemartini. Photograph by Briner2306, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cesare Pavese referred to his Dialoghi con Leucò (The Leucothea Dialogues) as “a conversation between divinity and humanity.” In the twenty-seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discuss things like desire, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of whom have been extracted from the narratives in which they serve as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in a space that might be nowhere or anywhere. They reflect on their own existences and dilemmas, debating, interrogating, or confiding in one another. What is it to be Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one’s love, to remember, to smile? And what is it to be mortal, to be subject to death, or to be immortal, to lack a death of one’s own? (The author’s suicide, three years after the publication of the Dialogues, gives many of these questions an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he was carrying at the time of his death, into a mythical object.) Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together By Sophie Madeline Dess Chris Kraus, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Chris Kraus is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Chris Kraus is also the author of The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel in which the main character, Catt Greene, is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Catt jokes that I Love Dick is “the one with the cover everyone posed with and tweeted.” Catt suspects at least a few of the people who pose with her book haven’t actually read it, but they like what owning the book implies: that they, too, love dick. It makes no difference that the novel is not exactly about loving dick, but about loving Dick, a particular man, not a sex organ. Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace By Karl Ove Knausgaard Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness. Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.” Read More