I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes
Megan Fernandes’s third collection of poems, I Do Everything I’m Told, injects new life into the love poem. The book skates thrillingly between desire and race and sexuality, her writing smart without ever lecturing. “Letter to a Young Poet,” for instance, feels like taking a meandering walk with one of your most brilliant and curious friends. “To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth,” Fernandes writes, delivering a clear stab of wisdom, before dropping into a pair of arresting claims: “A good city will not parent you. Every poet has a love affair with a bridge.” But the collection is at its most confident and vulnerable when Fernandes writes about heartache and desire. In “Drive,” the speaker grasps through the aftermath of a breakup and the cliches it inspires but eventually stumbles upon a profound sense of acceptance: “Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.” Fernandes’s poems are aching and sly. They capture everything beautiful and insufferable and enormous about falling in love. —Isle McElroy
