From BEST BOOKS OF 2012, P.S. in this week’s New Yorker comes this blurb from contributor Sasha Frere-Jones:

Patricia Lockwood is one of the few people who makes Twitter seem like it needed inventing, rather than being a new digital signal to abide. As @TriciaLockwood, she sends out odes to horny animals and historical horniness, often as a “SEXT.” As a poet, Lockwood is equally perverse but not as committed to laffs. Her first collection, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” manages to be both languid and kind of thrilling. The voice behind “Yo JK Rowling STOP writing books about wizard school & START writing books about wizard JAIL which think about it would be even MORE intense” can also drive poems about books becoming mangos and dictionary salesmen whose stomachs eat themselves. Lockwoodâ€s world is full of potholes and long rhythms, but itâ€s most satisfying when the ideas are big enough to make the punch lines irrelevant.

And from the Chicago Tribune, Poetry in neglect; Michael Robbins offers his picks for small-press collections you likely missed in 2012:

To her thousands of fans, Lockwood is famous for being the funniest person on Twitter. But she’s a poet first, with a Popeye fetish and a love of lilt: “the light is a lapful of limes.” There’s a savage intelligence at work in this debut collection of poems that compensate for their occasional self-satisfaction with an imagination the size of hammerspace: “a superscript hovers near / each head, th or nd or nth or st, they make our mere / numbers into Birthdates.” Lockwood is a tremendously gifted imagist: the gleam of ore is “like the small / yellow bird on the clean of a hippo tooth.” The materiality of signifiers bugs her like a duck run amuck:

The forest

is in a foreign country, all animals are possible

here, and all possible animals begin to appear.

The stage directions say: “The ‘forest’ is full of eyes,”

and the stage directions say: “The ‘forest’ is full of all

fours.

Lockwood’s loping lines follow a Disney dream logic and dance like enchanted mops. Bonus points for cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt’s incredible cover illustration of a herd of Popeye ungulates.

I’ve previously mentioned Lockwood’s appearance on the bestseller lists and linked to this article about Lockwood by Jessica Leigh Lebos in Connect Savannah.

I’m embarrassed to say that I have not yet read Balloon Pop Outlaw Black.

But I’m still pretty confident in saying that all this great press is having a positive spillover effect on the rest of the Savannah literary scene.

And what’s all this about Twitter?

Here are Lockwood’s last two tweets, as I write this:

Savannah-based poet Patricia Lockwood has just published her first book: Balloon Pop Outlaw Black from Octopus Books.

And things are going swimmingly, with the book at #29 on the poetry bestsellers as tracked by the Poetry Foundation. If #29 sounds pretty far down the list, take a look at some of the names ahead of Lockwood: Mary Oliver, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, Natasha Trethewey, Wendell Berry, and other familiar names.

Bill DeYoung at Connect Savannah wrote recently about Lockwood. From The word absurd, which came out in advance of her first book:

The daughter of a Catholic priest, Lockwood grew up as part of a strict religious family in Indiana and Missouri.
Both precocious and a self–professed nerd, she started writing poetry at the age of 8. “I was obsessed with Greek mythology. I had a fossil collection. I was extremely lame.”

As a teen, things got a bit more serious. “You have a sort of insane self–confidence that what youâ€re doing is genius work. And obviously itâ€s not. But if you persist in that belief for a period of like 15 years, that gives you the sort of swagger thatâ€s necessary to sit down every day and write.”

Young Patricia entered one poetry contest after another, and as the years passed, and her work took on a more surreal tone, she got published in The New Yorker, The Awl, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary and other prestigious publications.

“I was always very ambitious, even psychotically so,” she explains. “In the sense that when youâ€re 16 and you have this manuscript of awful poetry, and youâ€re sending it to contests, clearly you want it to be your destiny that you eventually have a book published.”

Here’s Lockwood at Seersucker Live in fall 2011 reading “An Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World”:

Lockwood can be found occasionally on her blog, but she’s especially busy on Twitter, where she has over 15,000 followers. She’s currently on a tour of the Northwest promoting the new book.