Books
I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes Tin House Books, 2023 paperback, 104 pages, $16.95
Megan Fernandes’ latest collection of poems, I Do Everything I’m Told, begins with an epigraph from Gwendolyn Brooks: “Sit where the light corrupts your face.” Fernandes takes this instruction to heart—the fresh light of each poem works to destabilize the lyric ‘I’.
Much like Fernandes’ last collection, Good Boys, the title itself deals in contradictions. On one hand, I Do Everything I’m Told indicates domination and systems of power where marginalized people are rendered both invisible and hypervisible. It captures the demand to become easily identifiable under threat of violence, and how responses to these demands are ignored, humanity willfully misunderstood or erased. On the other, I Do Everything I’m Told is Fernandes’ rebuttal, a jouissance of performed, intentional illegibility. Fernandes says it herself: “It’s better to be illegible, /sometimes. Then they can’t govern you.” She posits this as a new mode for self-understanding, a new linguistic space—queer, ecstatic, and borderless.
Brooks’ epigraph is the guiding (il)logic of the collection, where Fernandes’ speakers
