Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

Patricia Lockwood's poetry collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black from Octopus Books feels like the most unified anthology of poems I've read in awhile. It's a collection in the true sense of the word.

Inside this book cartoons are words. And words are objects -- personified and three-dimensional. The first third of the collection is about the word "popeye," as you may be able to tell from Lisa Hanawalt's amazing cover art. And a recurring theme is the physicality of words themselves.

Example:

From "The Church of the Open Crayon Box"

Fat geese fly in any letter you like but you need
red meat for once, and write a splayed-hide word
like "Deerslayer," and take hold of the ending

                                          and drag it home,                                            

and

From "The Father of the Fictional Alphabet"

The letters must be forged--the father of the fictional alphabet

wears protective glasses, and holds flat and round sounds

in the roaring fire and uses a seashell for flux, and then drops

each letter in a bowl of cool water, and they steam in the shape

              of themselves, and the father of the fictional alphabet

rivets them to the machine: on all sides, in brass letters, it says:

              and it belches black smoke and itself,

and white mice run in wheels inside it, a clearie marble

rolls down a track, and here is a slot for quarters where

you buy a chgnk chgnk sound. The letters have whirligigs

in them, the letters release hundreds of helicopters, the letters

have snakes that slip between stones, the letters grow parrot-

head flowers, and the letters are bodies settled with blackflies.

I'm absolutely in love with the poem "Good Climbing Trees Grow Us", which I couldn't pick just part of to share. So do yourself a favor and buy the book, or check it out in issue 11 of MAKE.

But here are some other passages I loved:

From "When We Move Away From Here, You'll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung"

After supper, he sits on the porch with a
long black shotgun and waits for a
buffalo to wander into view. He uses
every part of the buffalo--he uses them
down to their eye whites, he uses the
very lines that make them up.

He walks to the city to be counted in
the census. A wind gets itself up and
ruffles him relentlessly, but miniature
monuments hold him down.

His paper is usually stacked neatly,
especially when still in original trees.

Lives where? In voices: hills and valleys. Lives
all in the alphabet as if it were a rowhouse.
Lives at the peak of the tallest chalk hill.

Or lives: nowhere at all. He wanders the desert,
written on old skins, moaning,
"Where is home, where is home?" And
waits for a tent peg to be driven
through his skull.

From "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace"

She moves as smoothly as the moment of a mousetrap, and
when her cartoon needs a mousetrap she gives one to him.

Even the act of extending an arm toward him produces a trombone.

And as she watches herself extend an arm, a collapsible
spyglass leaps out of her eye.

When she tiptoes across the lawn, so does a small green rose bush.

When a wrecking ball swings out of nowhere, she is riding it;
she makes a round cutout in the enemy's house and then
rides the cutout home.

Imagine her body as a barrel of gunpowder, uncorked,
spilling black along the ground behind it.

When she spreads her arms and sinks down, she brings a
detonator into the world.

87 pages
3,529 / 20,000 page goal