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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." A Best Poetry Collection of 2023 at Electric Literature
A Best Book of the Season at Vogue and Vulture
-
Moving. . . .irresistible…. Transforms verse into multiverse.-The New Yorker
Wrestling with issues of desire, sexuality, loss, and adventure to extremely compelling effect.-Vogue
Captivating.-New York Magazine
These poems dislocate space and time to navigate a landscape of complex and ambiguous intimacies.-Electric Literature, A Best Poetry Collection of 2023
Captivating. . . . generates surprising revelations and releases unruly energies out of perfectly sculpted forms.-The Millions
These poems will kiss you on the mouth, slap you across the face, make you a cup of tea, and tell you their secrets. The language is energetic and ecstatic, and the drops into grief, discovery, and profundity are unparalleled.-CJ Hauser, The Week
Megan Fernandes writes beautifully on the thorny relationship between grief, regret, and desire with verse that spans continents and beloveds and alternate timelines. . . . Fernandes's poems are loving and messy but always precise, her insights the kind that make you reevaluate your entire life. This book captures Fernandes at her most mature, exciting, and brave. I Do Everything I'm Told is a perfect entry point to Fernandes's captivating and irreverent style.
-Vulture
Moving. . . . An unforgettable voice filled with intense longing for both the sacred and profane.-Associated Press
A drop-dead funny, queer-of-color testimony to the ecstasies and weltschmerz of a life lived in resistance to various restraints. . . . It shows us language renewed by love and love's excess, and it offers to the children of the diaspora homes built on white space, on echo and break.-Poetry
Whether the speaker is having an "ugly cry" before "hopping along" at a K-pop dance class in Shanghai or asking a grocery store clerk whether they sell dignity, the conversational, playful movement of these poems bounces successfully off a formal control that extends to a "Fuckboy Villanelle" in which "Eurydice's tomb / was lousy with my amours.-LitHub, A Best Poetry Collection of June
Vibrant. . . . Fernandes's voice is immediate and urging, full of a kind of lighthearted sagacity. . . .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.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Honest, often messy, and always expertly lyrical.-Los Angeles R
"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." A Best Poetry Collection of 2023 at Electric Literature
A Best Book of the Season at Vogue and Vulture
-
Moving. . . .irresistible…. Transforms verse into multiverse.-The New Yorker
Wrestling with issues of desire, sexuality, loss, and adventure to extremely compelling effect.-Vogue
Captivating.-New York Magazine
These poems dislocate space and time to navigate a landscape of complex and ambiguous intimacies.-Electric Literature, A Best Poetry Collection of 2023
Captivating. . . . generates surprising revelations and releases unruly energies out of perfectly sculpted forms.-The Millions
These poems will kiss you on the mouth, slap you across the face, make you a cup of tea, and tell you their secrets. The language is energetic and ecstatic, and the drops into grief, discovery, and profundity are unparalleled.-CJ Hauser, The Week
Megan Fernandes writes beautifully on the thorny relationship between grief, regret, and desire with verse that spans continents and beloveds and alternate timelines. . . . Fernandes's poems are loving and messy but always precise, her insights the kind that make you reevaluate your entire life. This book captures Fernandes at her most mature, exciting, and brave. I Do Everything I'm Told is a perfect entry point to Fernandes's captivating and irreverent style.
-Vulture
Moving. . . . An unforgettable voice filled with intense longing for both the sacred and profane.-Associated Press
A drop-dead funny, queer-of-color testimony to the ecstasies and weltschmerz of a life lived in resistance to various restraints. . . . It shows us language renewed by love and love's excess, and it offers to the children of the diaspora homes built on white space, on echo and break.-Poetry
Whether the speaker is having an "ugly cry" before "hopping along" at a K-pop dance class in Shanghai or asking a grocery store clerk whether they sell dignity, the conversational, playful movement of these poems bounces successfully off a formal control that extends to a "Fuckboy Villanelle" in which "Eurydice's tomb / was lousy with my amours.-LitHub, A Best Poetry Collection of June
Vibrant. . . . Fernandes's voice is immediate and urging, full of a kind of lighthearted sagacity. . . .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.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Honest, often messy, and always expertly lyrical.-Los Angeles R