Lauren O’Neal is a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in publications like Slate, the New Inquiry, and LA Review of Books. She is the former assistant editor of The Rumpus and is currently an associate editor at Midnight Breakfast. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal.
Previously by Lauren O'Neal: A Woman Reviews Patricia Lockwood. When she was fifteen, Juliana Delgado Lopera moved with her family from Bogotá, Colombia to Miami. As her mother became more and more involved with an Evangelical Christian church there, Juliana “started realizing I was queer—and it was a horrible realization when you come from a very religious family.” After high school, she left Florida for UC Berkeley, where she applied because she knew Judith…
When I interviewed Patricia Lockwood for the Rumpus, she said of her then-forthcoming book Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, “No one even wants poetry to sound like this, but now it does.” Her thousands of fans would not agree, but certain reviewers, it turns out, would. Adam Plunkett for the New Yorker’s website and Jonathan Farmer for the Slate Book Review both regard the book in part as a roundabout way of mocking people like them.
