Poetry

**Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), 104pp. Paperback, $16.95.**

Megan Fernandes’s new book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told, is divided into four sections. The second section, “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception or Repetition Compulsion,” is the gravitational center of the book. (It was originally published in the Winter 2023 issue of the Kenyon Review, though Fernandes here adds one poem, “Diaspora Sonnet,” to it—an addition that enhances the total effect.) This section features a crown of sonnets, a specific kind of sonnet sequence in which the last line of one poem becomes the first line of the next. Eventually, the last line of the final poem repeats the initial line of the first, and we come full circle. (Readers of LaVeRB will recall, from our last issue’s review of Henri Cole’s poetry, that the sonnet is having a moment right now.)

Fernandes riffs on the traditional crown structure in two ways. First, she often alters the line in its transition from closer to opener. For example, the closing line “I am young and nothing is sacred yet” next becomes the opening line “You are young and nothing is sacred yet.” The crown is crooked, unstable, lines and pronouns shifting like loosened gemstones in jewelry. Such motion is fitting for this particular set of verses. Fernandes is a poet “on the run,” each of her sonnets bearing the name of a different city: “Shanghai Sonnet,” “Los Angeles Sonnet,” “Lisbon Sonnet,” etc. She can’t be pinned down—not by a zip code, not by a beloved.

Second, Fernandes’s crown also contains a version of each sonnet remixed as an erasure poem. When she leaves a location, she leaves behind a trace of the sonnet, fragments coalescing into faded memories. “The cruelest person I have loved” simply becomes “the person I loved.” These are the wandering sonnets of an errant artist who leaves behind scattered little songs, literally a “Diaspora Sonnet.”

“I cast beloveds,” this crown begins (in “Shanghai Sonnet”). “I kill them off, too.” What a great line! Are the beloveds cast aside, like bad thoughts, or cast off, like a restrictive piece of attire, or cast forward, like a fishing line dangling bait? Does Fernandes love ’em and leave ’em? Or perhaps these beloveds are cast like aspersions, like defamatory sparks?

Or are they given roles in a performance, cast to play the parts that the poet gives them? “In role-play and foreplay, I break character / and make things as unsexy as possible,” she confesses in “Los Angeles Sonnet.” She is an actor/director, an auteur who films on location.

Cosmopolitan travel is a major theme of the entire collection. It feels like half the poems in the book feature a different city: Mumbai, Shanghai, Palermo, Paris, Miami, Venice, Vienna, Phoenix. Fernandes seems equally at home everywhere, from Arizona to Zurich. She writes of a “weird hope” for an “eternal present” in which “we all wake to simultaneous dawns / breaking over Hong Kong and Nairobi, / Guatemala City and Madrid.” In a prominent review, Kamran Javadizadeh focuses on the book’s “relentless geography,” its globetrotting restlessness. These are not poems of places so much as poems of displacement. One place becomes another, becomes another, becomes another.

If Fernandes is a poet cast adrift, she nevertheless finds a mooring in her verses. The lines rope her in and secure her to an otherwise tenuous world. “I don’t believe in kin by blood,” she writes, “but I believe poems can give form to the formless, / that one can resurrect roads not taken in a line / and give it a name.” One can eat one’s cake and have it, too, Frost-ing and all. And she is quick to assert that, despite her wanderings, she is more Circe than Odysseus: “I hold down the island. / I don’t drown my own men in the sea.”

These are not poems of places so much as poems of displacement. One place becomes another, becomes another, becomes another.

And while Fernandes repeatedly pivots, the language in these poems pops—as when a dead lover leaves a trace of “velvet livingness,” or when a doctor learns “how to intubate patients on youtube.” Personal declarations are buttressed by the mounting wordplay, and the verses stay alive.

This collection features several standout poems. Among the strongest are “Rilke,” “Phoenix,” and “Get Your Shit Together and Come Home.” (The latter title reflects “a perfect middle-aged tattoo.”) And another is “Beggars and Choosers,” a great post-pandemic poem. Channeling Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in an epigraph, it captures the frustration and even madness of lockdown isolation.

Ginsberg had written of “the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination.” Fernandes writes to a friend, maybe a lover, who gets so lonely under lockdown that “you begin / to personify furniture, and send me a video / of your body dancing with a ladder.” This could easily turn into a joke, but Fernandes finds bitterness. “I hate your audacious whimsy, bright as a smashing orange / against the sirens’ howl.” Who could flippantly leap into hallucinatory dance while ambulances carry the dead and dying down the street? “I want evidence that you, too, suffered.”

This envy for those who suffer least during cataclysmic times strikes a powerful tone in a collection characterized by diasporic displacement. I Do Everything I’m Told is a significant work, a mature set of reflections and reconsiderations by a leading poet.