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.
"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
Review of Books
"Compelling. . . . Fernandes writes with an inventiveness and sense
of play that add dimension to her formal acuity."—Pleiades
Press
"Powerful. . . . Remarkable. . . . leans into fear and comes out
the other side. Fernandes is a poet with an impressively broad
skillset, one that is sure to render this one of the most talked
about collections of the year."—The Poetry Question
"Stunning. . . . so full of vibrant writing—the kind that’s funny
without trying to be—that you might miss at first how haunted it
is."—McSweeny's
"Defends not just joy, but also poetic language and its powers of
reconstitution."—On the Seawall
"Megan Fernandes is one of my favorite poets because she does
things on the page that I and most other poets can’t imagine. Her
rhapsodic lineation, her liberated image and metaphor. All that
wonder is on display in her new stunner, I Do Everything I’m Told.
The collection is, at its center, a book of love poems like all the
best poetry collections are. The pretense of love, the past tense
of love, and what we do when the little galaxies we build with
others start to come apart. Fernandes navigates these spaces with
the kind of slick wit and care that love poems require: awareness,
eros, and utter abandon. Her first two collections showed us the
possibilities for a different kind of poem. I Do Everything I’m
Told shows us what poetry looks like in the aftermath." —Adrian
Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
"Beautiful, provocative pleasures, these poems apply a
sophisticated intelligence to the most vulnerable and insatiable
yearnings. Fernandes degloves traditions of love poetry through her
radically adventurous poetry, baring the muscle beneath the skin.
Each poem, ungovernable and alive to the contemporary moment,
carries forward an original and compelling vision. The result is a
brilliant triumph—both poignant and bracing."—Lee Upton, author of
The Day Every Day Is
"In I Do Everything I’m Told, we are embraced simultaneously by
finality and ambiguity, rules made only to be broken, and in their
tesserae lies a beauty that rejects its own existence while
reflecting back our own. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a
beautiful thing / if I saw it,’ Fernandes writes, making of wonder
itself a journey beyond the veil where death, violence, and
uncertainty herald revision, witness, and love. An incredible
book!" —Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny
"I love the way this poet celebrates the contradictions of the
human condition in poems that are as wise as they are wily. This is
a poet whose work displays formal acuity, yes, as but also an
expansive depth of play. This collection serves and swerves, sings
and swings."—Tarfia Faizullah, author of Registers of Illuminated
Villages
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