Join us on Tuesday, September 26 at 7pm PT when Megan Fernandes and Edgar Kunz celebrates their collections, I Do Everything I'm Told and Fixer, at 9th Ave!
Featuring poets Madeleine Cravens and Shelley Wong
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online at the link below
https://youtube.com/live/83gYRdiXZbU?feature=share
About I Do Everything I'm Told
Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told explores disobedience and worship, longing and possessiveness, and nights of wandering cities. Its poems span thousands of miles, as a masterful crown of sonnets starts in Shanghai, then moves through Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Palermo, Paris, and Philadelphia—with a speaker who travels solo, adventures with strangers, struggles with the parameters of sexuality, and speculates on desire.
Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you.” Strangers, ancestors, priests, ghosts, the inner child, sisters, misfit raccoons, Rimbaud, and Rilke populate the pages. Beloveds are unnamed, and unrealized desires are grieved as actual losses. The poems are grounded in real cities, but also in a surrealist past or an impossible future, in cliché love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturn’s rings looking back at Earth. When things go wrong, Fernandes treats loss with a sacred irreverence: “Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.”
About Fixer
From the author of the award-winning and 'gritty, insightful debut' (Washington Post) Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s sophomore collection of poetry rolls up its sleeves to reckon with legacies of labor and the question of worth in a system built on exploitation.
Fixer pairs love poems with elegies. Through the untimely death of his father, a handyman and addict, through first loves and lasting loves, Kunz asks what it costs, exactly, to build lives and relationships together. And is it possible to untether this work from the demands of daily survival?
With lyrical yet accessible vignettes, expertly weaving melancholia and humor, Kunz brings the reader on a journey across the country, and through American late capitalism, that is both damning and brimming with hope.
Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer (Ecco, August 2023) and Tap Out (Mariner, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore.
Madeleine Cravens is a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. She has been the recipient of support from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Teaching Artist Project. She was the first place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Poetry Contest and 2020 30 Below Contest, a semifinalist for 92 Street Y’s 2021 Discovery Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She lives in Oakland. Her debut collection, Pleasure Principle, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2024.
Named a Best Book of the Season by Vogue and Vulture.
“Moving. . . .irresistible. . . .Transforms verse into multiverse.”—The New Yorker
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.
From the author of the award-winning Tap Out – “a gritty, insightful debut” (Washington Post) – Edgar Kunz’s second poetry collection propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America.
Shelley Wong's debut, As She Appears (longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and winner of a 2023 Lambda Literary Award), foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love.