Good Boys: Poems
In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian Ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.
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Good Boys: Poems
In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian Ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.
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Good Boys: Poems

Good Boys: Poems

by Megan Fernandes
Good Boys: Poems
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Good Boys: Poems

Good Boys: Poems

by Megan Fernandes

Overview

In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian Ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781947793408
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication date: 02/18/2020
Pages: 126
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

I

In Which I Become a Mythology and Also, Executed 3

Indigo 7

Amsterdam 8

Dior 12

Fabric in Tribeca 13

White People Always Want to Tell Me That They Grew Up Poor 15

Nukemap.com 20

How Have You Prepared for Your Death? 22

Bad Habit 23

How to Say Congratulations-I'm Sorry-Who Are You Now 25

Five of Swords 27

The Eulogy 29

Why We Drink 31

Belleville 34

Running in the Suburbs 37

Regret Is a Blue Dive 39

II

Good Boys 45

Night Walk on Long Island 47

At the Public Library, Surrounded by the Unlikely in Montauk, NY 48

Phone Call in the Trees 50

Venus, Aged 52

The Jungle 54

Sonora 57

It's Getting Dark. It's Going to Rain 59

Coloring Hour 61

Sicilia 63

The Edward Albee Barn 65

Modern Nation-States 66

What Will You Miss about the Earth? 69

Manchester to Lisbon 70

Calypso in Paris 71

The Poet Holds a Gun 74

Conversion 76

III

Scylla and Charybdis 81

Night, the First 83

The Thursday of Two Bodies 85

Alice and Eileen 88

Tell Me What You Know about Dismemberment 90

Rhode Island Wedding 91

While I Keep Making the Room Brighter 93

In the Beginning 96

Church Girls 98

SalmonFly 100

In California, Everything Already Looks like an Afterlife 101

Employees Only 103

How to Have a Baby in the Anthropocene 104

No Black. No Asian. No Femme. 106

White Insomnia 108

Baudelaire Says: Write a Poem to Your Creditors 110

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Related Subjects

Poetry
American Poetry
Other American Poetry
Poetry
American Poetry
Other American Poetry

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