Patricia Lockwood Knihy

A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet – or what she terms 'the portal'. Are we in hell? the people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die? Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: 'Something has gone wrong,' and 'How soon can you get here?' As real life and its stakes collide with the increasing absurdity of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the infinite scroll and a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.

Lockwood's long poem about being raped, Rape Joke, became a viral hit in 2013, not just because it is shocking, but because it is brilliant. The poems in [this] collection ... are the work of a genuine original. They are surreal, they are funny, they are subversive. They do what poetry is meant to do: they make you look at things in a different way Christina Patterson Sunday Times

Candles and Water is a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival.This collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost; and when they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.