I spent the weekend bleary-eyed and sore from receiving the new Moderna vaccine against COVID-19 and the flu shot on Saturday morning. Technicians, I observed, are no longer warning anyone about side-effects or keeping patients seated to observe for possible light-headedness. No one is required to wear a mask in the area or during the transaction. Neither shot is free for the uninsured. Freshly unemployed and between insurance plans, the Moderna shot cost me $192.00, and the flu shot bled an additional $62.00. For the last two days, I’ve been bedridden and weaving in and out of confusing fever-dreams. If you have POTS, fibromyalgia, or ME/CFS, you may want to prepare for cold flashes with acute pain in the joints, brain fog, random involuntary spasms, and body-wide aches. A great time. Even better when you pay out the nose for the experience. There. I told you so the technician doesn’t have to. I am deeply grateful to have a comfortable home to recover in, and a partner generous enough to spend two whole days ministering to my needs. Neither was true upon the first infection, which this felt quite a lot like.
Last week, I furiously interrogated Hasan Minhaj’s abuse of audience trust, so I spent this week steeping myself deeply in the work of poets whose honesty, intentional and otherwise, rather wrecks me. If you know me, you know I have a soft spot for poetry that comes for me like a sword through the jugular, but sometimes reading Megan Fernandes’ work feels like looking in a funhouse mirror. Fernandes, a queer feminist East African Goan Indian American poet, recently read her work at a book launch event for Edgar Kunz’s Fixer at Brooklyn Poets, and though I’d read and loved both of her most recent books, I haven’t been able to get the emotional universe of her out of my gut since. She feels like a cosmic big sister somehow, a reflection of a kind no blood sibling could really be. Like me, Fernandes feels like a soul who exists in the activity of movement and expression, as if her untethering from place makes her a mirage when still. By contrast, Patrick Rosal’s dislocations between New York and the Philippines manifest in a nostalgic dreamscape that, too, pivots on gender as its central point of recognition. The two poets’ work have enacted an interesting dance-off in my mind of late, making me wonder about loneliness and collectivity, and how much of place has nothing to do with location at all.
Megan Fernandes’ Good Boys and I Do Everything I’m Told
Megan Fernandes’ books Good Boys (Tin House, 2020) and I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023) express contradictory identity, nihilism, rage, and existential dread with vulnerability both tender and prickly. Some of her poems sound so much as if I might have written them that I find myself unable to read her work with any critical objectivity. Though Fernandes grew up in Philadelphia and lives in New York, her poems in Good Boys traipse across the U.S. and Europe, documenting the ways a body that struggles to belong in any place can be overdetermined from within and without by gender and race. In I Do Everything I’m Told, the peripatetic searching remains, but the questions shift distinctly in their tenor toward what it means to have faith in love when climate and nuclear threats bottom out any hopes of human futurity. Both books are concerned with failure, what it means to be seen, and what we're willing to do to rise out of our own invisibilities, even if we did nothing to create them, especially when we are the only ones seeing right through ourselves.
Good Boys opens with a gut-punch reminder of the ways gender overdetermines everything about a South Asian diasporic body:
In January, I will visit India and fail there too, because I am childless or because I am in America where they gun down babies …
Grace is a word that stings. Because if you don’t have it, you are not a lady. And if you are not a lady, then what are you.
The speaker anticipates failure based on previous failures, understanding herself as failing by her very existence in circumstances she did not create. In India she is too American for her failure to embody feminine respectability through grace, politeness, perhaps meekness, and certainly marriage and motherhood. In America, her brownness makes her suspect—her integration into the nation-state always held a little at bay due to class assumptions, exoticization, or both. That respectable femininity is not a thumb under which this speaker lives as she travels through the U.S. and Europe comes as no relief. If one is not a respectable woman, then what? “Chucked meat./ Beast girl on speed.” The push-and-pull between identities produces a world of quiet chaos enacted primarily on one’s own body and choices. “We grew into dragons/ and ate too many pills in college/ groveling on the floor,” she writes, without needing to name what exactly beast girls grovel for, and to whom.
The speaker travels around the world, marking herself as a body that counts, that speaks, constantly under threat of erasure–including her own. She marks her geography over and over–Amsterdam, Tribeca, Long Island, Montauk, Sicilia, Lisbon, Paris, Ireland, California. On her travels, she often reads the greats of the Western canon, their impact on the shape of the First World in constant conversation with her as she writes her body into it. The poem “Bad Habit,” rehearses all the states through which the speaker travels on a road trip–Vermont, New Hampshire, former car-rides in LA, Santa Barbara, mapping trajectories that place her all over this white country where belonging is always held at an elusive distance for the femme brown body, no matter how learned, no matter how beautiful. This rehearsal of place is deeply familiar to those of us who have to braid our own roots and seed them, only to find ourselves once again on the move. The poem grieves for a dead friend, but also for a different, parallel sadness that has to do with this constant psychological threat of invisibility, or perceived lack of impact upon the world: “What I learned most from you is how/ to be a body that does not react,/ to play dead in an unearned paradise./ What I learned from you is how/ not to be a body.” The diasporic child is not the one who made the sacrifices to place us in the land of milk and honey, so the best we can do is be good, be appropriate, be successful, be qualified, and most of all, perhaps, to make no waves and want nothing. What is that but the practice of forever attempting not to be a body, only to find oneself more corporeal to oneself each time? How could we not move through our lives writing versions of: “I exist, I was here, this place has a name, this is the music that was playing, this was the vibe, this is the thought in my head, and in it is another person who can prove to you that I was here, that I’m alive”? In Sonora, she writes, “I went missing a few times as a child/ and I always wanted a trophy when I was found, as if there were credit/ to be given for being discernible.”
We do get credit for being discernible, usually through a combination of degrees and approval for appropriate femininity. Some of us stop at the stack of credentials–a process that crushes as much as it saves–and even then find ourselves invisibilized by patriarchal condescension. Fernandes reads Virgil, Theroux, Homer, and Baudelaire, but in “Why We Drink” at a university lecture:
…some older Italian man said no, said I was projecting as if projection were not interpretation but it was in front of a lot of people and what was the point of all my degrees and giving up a decade of life to school if I could be so easily humiliated and maybe I shouldn’t have worn jeans shredded at my thighs or that navy sweater, sleeves blooming with moth holes but if these are our Left institutions, if these are the men on our side, I said, then of course, I am going to drink.
Amen, sister. How this wasn’t pulled from a page in one of my journals, I do not know, but I felt the cheap plastic cup of rotgut wine in my hand, my body swallowed by an old faux leather chair on stained wall-to-wall carpeting while a white man I barely know talks to me about Heideggar, as if I’ve never read him, at some obligatory department holiday party. It’s these experiences that render the invisibilized irreverent to the point of nihilistic gallows humor. (Perhaps in over-identifying, I, too, am projecting, but truly, how is that not an ethos of interpretation?) And what better tools does a woman have for her own erasure and her battle against it than melancholy combinations of intellect, movement, men, and liquor? What happens when we dare pull the thread of our dislocations out further and further, in writing, in public, unraveling the figure we’re meant to cut? “Get sloppy, delicate. Be a feral amateur.”
If Good Boys is an anthem for lost girls, then I Do Everything I’m Told is a guide for grown women who have learned better than to have any trust in authority, abstract or otherwise. In it, she doubles down on the global city as a site of exploration to develop a theory of loneliness that does not stop at the self. Concerns about nuclear war, the human inability to sustain lasting connection, the worth of a woman across time no longer stop at the self, whether one could reasonably bring a child into a world doomed by inevitable nuclear war and climate collapse, but what keeps us collectively stoking the fire of our own gaslighting. In “Shanghai,” “the bright plazas/ speed us into manic dream,/ the kind where you know/ your executioner is coming/ and we all get high/ on the fluorescence and doom.” These are poems that know that the cynic is just a romantic ashamed of her hopeful nature, her vulnerability to utopic fantasy. These are poems that speak the wisdom of the brokenhearted that will offer up the heart again and again as a similar kind of faith that refuses evidence:
…There is a version where the world goes uncrushed, and instead my beloveds multiply, and with them, their laughters. We all wake up to simultaneous dawns breaking over Hong Kong and Nairobi, Guatemala City and Madrid. When one beloved says good morning, another says, good morning. And for another, maybe it is still night.
In the middle of the collection is a cycle of poems called “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception OR Repetition Compulsion” that spans seven cities and ends in a “Diaspora Sonnet” in which each sonnet is flanked by its own erasure poem. Each of the poems remixes lines from the combination of the previous until the pathos of repetition, rotation, and revision culminates in a two-page spread of erasure fragments, most starting with “I,” and all of them verbs. We keep doing and doing and doing, regardless of location, and often doing the same thing in a rehearsal of our own ontology, which requires gaslighting the self into doing unto futurity that we know will never come. In “Nukemap.com” in Good Boys, she writes, “You still expect them to save you. You still believe in elders.” In I Only Ever Do What I’m Told, a poem addressed to a beloved states, “Years later, you said/ the difference between the two of us was that I always/ thought someone was coming to save me./ …if I am saved by three wise men, what will this cost me?/ Will I have to drop to my knees?/ Because no man gives salvation away for free.”
Nor does any man, or anyone else, including drink, or solitude, or sex, have salvation to offer, and that includes the speaker. We tell ourselves the lies we must and balk against them in a tail-chase of post-post modern pathos that is only interrupted by the possibility of grace between beloved friends. Both books are full of friends, bits of conversation, travel companions, partners of the mind living on different hemispheres whose brilliance nonetheless illuminates the night. While futurity is pulled out from underneath us, there is something to be said for training one’s spirit on finitude. In “How To Have Sex in Your Thirties (Or Forties)” (which I strongly recommend be read in its entirety on TriQuarterly), Fernandes puts a fine point on it:
Only way to fuck like you’re stalling
the body’s departure from doing
what bodies will do: end. …
But bodies that beget bodies?
Bodies that have buried the bodies
that made them? Bodes that have buried
the bodies they have begotten?
They know what multiplies and disappears.
Patrick Rosal’s Brooklyn Antediluvian
On this the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop, celebrated city-wide through the end of the year, I cannot help but think about the ways that so much of Asian America found its voice in the genre’s rhythms, sartorial styles, and forms of political resistance. Black and Asian solidarities reverberate throughout its history and continue to braid themselves into both contemporary music and contemporary poetry, particular poetry that roots itself in the figuring of Brooklyn as a site of struggle, collective care, and artistic creativity as working class cosmopolitanism. These are the textures that run through Patrick Rosal’s Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea, 2016), the Filipino-American poet’s fifth collection and winner of the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize for best book of poetry, and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry.
The collection’s rhythms move the reader through the layering of place, memory, and nostalgia as if on a subway, sliding between urban landscapes with copious enjambment and limited punctuation moving through, under, and over landscapes real, fictional, remembered, or mythic in a swirl of fragmented global memory cross-hatched across Rosal’s consciousness. He opens with nostalgic memories of winning fights on violent Lower East Side streets he called home. The braggadocio resonates with poems by John Murillo and countless rap narratives about coming up on streets on which the speaker thrived, despite the difficulty and risk that organized their logics. In his opening poem “Despedida: Brooklyn to Philly,” he writes, “In all the worlds I’ve loved,/ I thought I could murder a monster if it had a body to drop,/ a set of ribs to measure with a stiff jab and bury my best/ left hook.” Young and old, in Brooklyn, and in the Philippines, all of Rosal’s boys and men are fighters. They fight each other, for each other, bleeding and drawing blood that stains their clothes and much of their memory. They move as hoards, prideful and aggressive, young men whose memory may be entirely lost if not for Rosal’s mythologizing. It’s clear that these are the boys whose tenacity and grit made up much of Rosal’s early formations of identity and belonging. In “Ode to the Cee-Lo Players,” (Cee-Lo, for the unfamiliar, is an East Asian gambling game played with six-sided dice) he memorializes their wrangling with dominant narratives and creation of their own worlds within scarcity, poverty, insecurity, and violence:
Know that I have crouched among boys whose blistering with jacks the master alphabet the canons have handed them. We have been the young bucks who bear no standards and rep no set save the galactic brotherhood whose initiates have wrung blood from their own sleeves into public sinks.
These boys build their own turntables and DJ sets run their nights while they fight their way through the day on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan. These are not poems of lamentation, but of love. Two poems, “Lone Star Kundiman (For the Guy Who Seized My Arm After I Accidentally Cut the Line for the Toilet in Austin)” and “Kundiman: Hung Justice” model “kundiman,” a Filipinx musical form that is often a political and spiritual attitude expressed as a love song. It inspires a selfless attitude and intense longing, caring, devotion, and oneness with a romantic partner, parent, child, spiritual figure, motherland, ideal or cause, often patriotic in nature. Both are poems of resistance. The first references pop songs and reads a little like one, though it tells the story of a speaker starting a fight with a white Texan who got aggressive at a slight touch: “And/ you’re not the first knucklehead I’ve had to instruct/ in the company of strangers with an open-hand left cross/ delivered like a love song. Consider it a public/ education. No white boy left behind.” Ironically, this expression of resistance against white dominance takes place in Texas, and the Lone Star flag has long symbolized pride, defiance, and independence connected to Texas’ 1861 attempt to secede from the United States. We watch American masculinities rub up against each other and clash, this speaker proving that you don’t fuck with brown boys, though that’s who ultimately gets kicked out of the bar. The second kundiman is a postcolonial and anti-imperial reality check:
Love, a child dreamt hard of bread and got history
instead. Someone dreamt of maggot-jewels in meat and
brought out blades in the name of good science, ardor.
But who’ll list kinships in English between slaughter
and laughter? …
My America, you can’t even love a face
as handsome as a bomb.
The bodies of the galactic brotherhood vibrate with American’s inherent violence, but Rosal’s boys make it look good. Another kundiman (I would argue), “The Halo Halo Men: An Anthem,” cements the sweetness that accompanies male violence in this exploration of Brooklyn-Filipino masculinity. Halo-Halo is a a cold Filipino dessert, Halo Halo meaning “mix mix” Tagalog, and is a mixture of multi-textured ingredients topped with shaved ice and condensed milk. Though the dessert serves as an apt metaphor for the diasporic cultural mixtures with which Rosal and his boys make their own cultural forms, the poem speaks in a collective voice, moving between English and Tagolog as men claim themselves “Halo Halo men” to be feared, dangerous tricksters who “pee-pee in your Coke” and “suicide the cypher men,” asking the reader to “say three Hail Mary’s/ and whisper Hallelujah.” The poem is a love song, an ode, a threat, and reads like a a commercial jingle advertising pied-pipers for sweet treats like a coded message in a horror movie. The combination of the sing-song rhythm and the specifically Filipino childhood metaphor betrays the tremendous tenderness that these men, his brotherhood, elicit in him, and the nostalgia he feels for younger days when this tough exterior and hardknock quotidian was, or perhaps is, central to his selfhood.
The floods, the antediluvians that precede the American diasporic experience are both the hard reality and the mythos that make up the differently fragmented, precarious foundation of the collection’s mythos: The Philippines’ typhoons. The island nation’s shores are lashed by up to twenty of them a year during monsoon season, often causing flash floods that break down infrastructure and cost many rural and working-class lives. It is mostly in these contexts that women emerge, and in very different roles than his street-brawling boys. The book’s second poem creates the scene of a schoolteacher saving her young students by tethering them while a flash flood wipes away their homes. Women don’t reappear in the book until halfway through it, and often in a mythical or historical setting. In a fable, a young girl creates a horse from mud and gives birds their song in a tense relationship of competitive creation with God. In another poem, Rosal invents a romantic tale of two women with leprosy, Josefa and Filomena, banished from their island by an emperor who banished the sickly. A sweet portrait of access intimacy and the disabled supporting one another to co-create joy, the two women make music together on an equally broken makeshift guitar. Young girls in school uniforms are rendered mythic in a photograph by Noel Casis in an ekphrastic poem that follows them as they survive another Filipino typhoon. Nature’s violence, goaded by the global inequities that fuel climate change, is mournfully elevated into fictionalized and melancholic forms, perhaps inadvertently framed as a woman’s space. They all have a different resilience and capacity for nurturing, saving, and creating joy in collectivity and kindness in a landscape literally drowning around them. In both framings of inner and collective strength in the face of unjust violence, Rosal writes with soft-hearted dedication and fierce, devotional love.
Shoutouts and Recommendations
That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It My brilliant sibling in disability and poetry Leigh Sugar, founder and facilitator of the Disabled/ Chronically Ill/ Deaf/ Mad/ Crip Reading Series Access Oriented Lit, edited an anthology called That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions(New York University Press), and it’s now available! I would trust few others to come to this thorny subject with the sensitivity that Leigh brings to everything she does, all while fighting the good fight on multiple fronts for those of us barred from life deemed regular by powers that deem some of us expendable. Join her at the free virtual book launch by Literati Bookstore on October 10th, 7pm ET at bit.ly/LeighLiterati
Scavengers My partner, storyboard artist and animator Michael Weston threw this on for us last night over dinner and I have watched this animated short by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner three or four times since, mesmerized by its creativity, strangeness, and wild trust in its own whims. Titmouse will soon release a show based on it, and I am very much on board. Enjoy:
Substack Shoutouts
Fariha Roísin’s How To Cure a Ghost, “On Representation” Fariha Roísin continues to be a primary touchpoint for reflections on how to heal and do ancestral work without the structures of stable family or community to lean on or learn from. This particular essay, “On Representation,” cites some of the same works that made me feel seen and heard in new ways in our era of expanded racial representation in mainstream popular culture. I’m particularly moved by her meditation on time spent with a Dalit friend who must also create her own ways, and what it feels like for different desi diasporics to share that experience while thinking carefully and with accountability about the flattened differences in our experiences and ancestries. A beautiful read.
Lamniformes Cuneiform’s “The Summer of Barbenheimer” When we went to see Barbie and Oppenheimer together with a group of friends, I was so dense with ideas and connections that I was almost defeated. I felt there was no way to untangle it all without writing into histories and cultural contexts that I don’t have, and therefore, necessarily coming short of anything worth sharing with the world. As a feminist cultural critic obsessed with dolls (though largely from the point of view of psychosexual development and horror), I felt a kind of obligation to write, at least, about Barbie and the way feminist discourse is finally beginning to look toward resuscitating masculinities as something other than always-already toxic, or at least about the implicit rivalry latticed between characters played extraordinarily well by Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, despite Oppenheimer’s generally poor representation of women. However, every take I’ve had was likely published before I made my way into the theater, but my roommate Ian Cory took it upon himself to choose multiple unexpected points of entry to write a gargantuan and fascinating set of analyses from exactly the contexts I knew I didn’t even know I was missing. Read in parts over morning coffee in tandem with the playlist he made for exactly that purpose.
Ali Shapiro’s “Lonely Animals” on Memoir Monday There are few things I love reading about more than weird animals and melancholia, and Ali Shapiro has woven the two together in a gorgeous, Carmen Maria Machado-like essay on queer heartbreak and finding solace in nature. Short, luscious, and heart-wrenching.
