Patricia Lockwood's Reading List

"Roger Shattuck's "The Forbidden Experiment," about the wild boy of Aveyron. (Improbably it gave me the structure for a poem I was writing called "Party in the USA.")"

"Also, Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony.""

""The Witches of Eastwick" is a perennial fall read, and I can go back and graze on the short stories anytime I remember them, like potato chips."

"Everyone who reads "Anna Karenina" is on mushrooms, a bit. The windowpanes we look through in this novel are so absolutely warm and clear, the scenes are so spotlit, the perceptive hairs so raised, the colors and music so seeable and hearable."

"I was reading Ange Mlinko's "Difficult Ornaments" in Key West, and she sets forth a theory that the bight referred to in Elizabeth Bishop's great poem "The Bight" was actually Garrison Bight."

"I did think the recent rerelease of Alison Mills Newman's "Francisco" should have gotten more attention."

"I recommended "In the Eye of the Wild," where a bear tears off a woman's face."