I Do Everything I'm Told
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A TIME Best Book of 2023
“Moving. . . .irresistible. . . .Transforms verse into multiverse.”—The New Yorker
Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities. Its poems span thousands of miles, as a masterful crown of sonnets starts in Shanghai, then moves through Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Palermo, Paris, and Philadelphia—with a speaker who travels solo, adventures with strangers, struggles with the parameters of sexuality, and speculates on desire.
Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you.” Strangers, ancestors, priests, ghosts, the inner child, sisters, misfit raccoons, Rimbaud, and Rilke populate the pages. Beloveds are unnamed, and unrealized desires are grieved as actual losses. The poems are grounded in real cities, but also in a surrealist past or an impossible future, in cliché love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturn’s rings looking back at Earth. When things go wrong, Fernandes treats loss with a sacred irreverence: “Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vibrant second collection from Fernandes (Good Boys) is "for the restless," the dedication notes before embarking on a journey across four sections rich with cities (Brooklyn, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Palermo, Paris, Philadelphia, and Shanghai), as well as characters, strangers, and complex feelings. The opening poem boldly declares, "Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing/ if I saw it." Fernandes's voice is immediate and urging, full of a kind of lighthearted sagacity: "If you haven't taken the Amtrak in Florida, you haven't lived.... To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you. Every poet has a love affair with a bridge" ("Letter to a Young Poet"). In "How to Have Sex in Your Thirties (Or Forties)," she advises, "Only way is to fuck/ like you're stalling// the body's departure/ from doing// what bodies will do:/ end. Call it back// from its route/ to extinction." The poet's blend of irreverence, pathos, and humor works brilliantly in these pages full of winning allusions to Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Rilke, Jimmy Stuart, the cosmos, and K-pop. These candid and charismatic poems are full of life, existential questions, and unexpected turns of phrase.
