“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 lie 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
“Though disillusionment and restive leave-takings power so many of these poems, the aspiration to a new thoroughness of experience makes them glow with sensuality and presence.”
— Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing
“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 Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages
“It can be difficult to distinguish, as the titular poem puts it, between “what is kink or worship or both.” The former implies a perversion of the latter—or might it be the other way around? When considered through Fernandes’ expansive yet exacting gaze, the distinction between the two concepts is tangled, maybe even elided. Kink and worship are both states of acting on consuming, immersive love. Love as put into practice, with parameters and structure and ritual; love as a verb.”
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Named a Best or Most-Anticipated Book of 2023 by
The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, Vogue,
Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Vulture, LitHub, LitBowl,
Lambda Literary, Autostraddle
“For Fernandes…place is not desire’s terminus. Instead, the names of cities allow her to drop pins on a map of desire, to create a spatial record of an erotic life, its traffic, its compulsions…. exists something like a constellation…As words are stripped away, nonchalance also fades, leaving in its wake something hotter and raw…The geographic mode gives Fernandes a way to spatialize and examine the life lived… geography paradoxically points to places off the map, not to real life but to potential life, to places that can be inhabited only in the poems…transforms verse into multiverse.”
“This collection traverses the world from Shanghai to Brooklyn to Lisbon and even further, with Fernandes crafting a kinetic-voiced speaker who is constantly wrestling with issues of desire, sexuality, loss, and adventure to extremely compelling effect.”
“Captivating.”
— New York Magazine
“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. These candid and charismatic poems are full of life, existential questions, and unexpected turns of phrase.”
— Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
“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.”
“To say that Megan Fernandes writes funny—often devastatingly funny—teeming, jittery, compassionate, impatient lyrics is still to miss the deeper point. In her third collection of poems, I Do Everything I’m Told, there is something else flowing under the dazzling surfaces, the ribald talk, the dancing in and out of narrative: there is a profound engagement with the question of history. Personal, political, global. The question of history might seem a dry one, but as Fernandes demonstrates, it is perhaps the question—as alive and twisted and full of lust and disaster as any human life or community.”
“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.”
“Funny and compelling, this stellar collection from Fernandes begins with “Tired of Love Poems” and ends with “Love Poem,” and so much love and desire and friendship resides between. Told in four parts, every sentence of this wowed me in one way or another or in myriad ways. Traveling to New York, Paris, Shanghai, Venice, Saturn, and elsewhere, this exploration of beloveds and cats, cemeteries and cities, and flowers and joy delighted me. Seriously, I want a copy for every room, a copy for every tote. Immediately after finishing this, I added the poet’s previous collection, Good Boys, to my TBR list.”
“My favorite poets uniquely combine humor and poignancy— Fernandes pushes even beyond that… It’s an elite level of poetry that tells us it’s theory while enacting it, without ever becoming ‘easy’ or obvious… we know Fernandes is smart, that she understands these concepts intellectually— but the poems prize her visceral experience above all.”
—American Poetry Review
“Transforms and elevates our human mistakes and imperfections into modes of vibrant survival. A candid voice tells us about sex and aging, travel and loss. In couplets, sonnets, and free verse, Fernandes writes fearlessly into the messy clamor of life.”
“Parsing the contradictory dimensions of desire, the twinned pangs of longing and disappointment, the poems of I Do Everything I’m Told pursue an ever more perfect mode of submission. They emerge out of a submissive impulse that becomes subversive as it generates surprising revelations and releases unruly energies out of perfectly sculpted forms. Unfolding these insights, Fernandes’s erotic poems draw from familiar tropes, feeling out new possibilities in old forms.”