Good Boys (Tin House Books) In an era of rising nationalism and
geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes's Good Boys offers a complex
portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel,
and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a
restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the
aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from
enchantment to disgust, always reemerging-just barely-on the trains
and bridges and barstools of New York City. A child of the Indian
ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it
means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are
muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are
theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a
fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during
turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the "hydrogen
fruit" of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an
affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth,
civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully
interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to
direct our mercy. Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin
House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review,
Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets,
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of
The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015). Her second book of
poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize (2018),
the Saturnalia Book Prize (2018), and is forthcoming with Tin House
Books in February 2020. Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English
at Lafayette College and teaches courses on poetry, creative
nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the
University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from
Boston University. Catherine Pond's debut collection, Fieldglass, won
the Crab Orchard First Book Award in Poetry (judge: Traci Brimhall) in
2019, and is forthcoming with Southern Illinois University Press in
2021. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the
University of Southern California and holds an MFA in Poetry from
Columbia University, where she was awarded the Academy of American
Poets Prize in 2013. She is co-founder of the online literary magazine
Two Peach (with Julia Anna Morrison). Catherine lives in Los Angeles.
Callie Siskel is the author of Arctic Revival, selected for a Poetry
Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in
Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Yale Review, and other journals. She
has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the
Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference,
the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the University of
Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow in
Creative Writing and Literature.
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01/03/2020 Last update