I Do Everything I'm Told - Couverture souple

Fernandes, Megan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1953534880 ISBN 13 : 9781953534880

Editeur : Tin House, 2023

Synopsis

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 propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Megan Fernandes is the author of Good Boys, and a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Common, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. An associate professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College, Fernandes lives in New York City.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

TIRED OF LOVE POEMS

But we never tire of them, do we?
We wish to worship more than just each other.
We put a god first, sometimes a tree,
write a sonnet to a bird in the black
of night or offer a light to a stranger
and not call it love. But it is. To pull
out a chair is more than manners.
What we tire of is that we never tire of it.
How it guts us. How it fails, then reappears.
Because what is the bird compared to you?
The bird is replaced each morning.
You approach on a red bike in summer
and the poem takes shape. I entitle it
anything but Love, anything but what it is.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Tin House
• Date d'édition: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1953534880
• ISBN 13: 9781953534880
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 104
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible