Where, in a poem, is “here”? Suppose a poem depicts a scene. When you read it, do you feel yourself transported there? Or do you feel in the presence of the poet at her desk, recalling the scene and telling you about it?
For Megan Fernandes, “here” often seems to designate a city. There’s New York City, where she lives, but also Mumbai, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Guatemala City, Madrid, Lisbon, Palermo, Philadelphia, Miami, Venice, Dar es Salaam, White Plains, Phoenix, Zurich, Vienna, and London: twenty cities named across the forty-nine poems of her third collection, “I Do Everything I’m Told” (Tin House). The book bears the dedication “For the restless.” Fernandes, who comes from a Goan family by way of Tanzania, counts herself among them.
And yet the proliferation of these cities imbues them with a sense of unreality; the poems don’t so much feel set in the cities as gesture toward them from some other, unspecified place. In one poem, which seems to occur in the aftermath of a breakup, Fernandes writes, “There is no home / and nothing to return to, just a series of shadows, partial signs of presence: a flickering.” One would be hard pressed to locate that flickering on a map; its only location seems to be the here and now of lyric enunciation: “I say things and then unsay them. It was love. It was not love. It is raining. It is not raining.” In another poem, she addresses a would-be lover with what could well be an address to us: “We put the art between us because the art exists / and we do not.”
Why, then, the book’s relentless geography? If “we” do not exist, if only “the art” does, why insist on telling us where we are? Poets have long invoked place names as objects of desire—an Ithaca to which one is bound to return, an Eden from which one has been exiled, a Kyoto for which, even in Kyoto, one longs. For Fernandes, though, 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. In the poem “Sagittarius,” she boards a plane bound for Zurich and promptly falls in love with her seatmate, a stranger to whom, in the poem’s final lines, she cannot help submitting: “Come see me in Vienna, you say. And I do. / Because I believe so much in being led.” That belief sometimes looks, as Fernandes describes it in the book’s title poem, like “kink or worship or both”—like desire that wrenches her out of the course of her life. And sometimes it looks like the annihilation of desire. “I just want,” Fernandes writes, “to be dwarfed / by everything / these days.”
But a belief in “being led” also leaves behind a trail, and Fernandes studies the map she’s made. “One winter,” Fernandes tells us, “I became very quiet / and saw my life.” She wants to know whether that life coheres as narrative, whether between the points of its global itinerary there exists something like a constellation. Fernandes tests this question in a crown of sonnets that appear in the book’s second section. (A crown is a sequence in which the last line of each sonnet is recast as the first line of the next; a final sonnet ends with the initial line of the first, closing the circuit.) Each sonnet in Fernandes’s crown addresses a beloved; each is titled for the city in which the love affair in question seems to have transpired.
While their form suggests coherence and closure, these are sonnets of “False Beloveds,” as Fernandes puts it in the section’s title. “Don’t take it personally,” she tells the beloved of “Shanghai Sonnet”: “I am young and nothing is sacred yet.” In a traditional crown (John Donne wrote one about the stages of Christ’s life), that line would be repeated at the start of the following sonnet. But “Brooklyn Sonnet,” next in the sequence, begins, “You are young and nothing is sacred yet.” Where the crown offers continuity, Fernandes leaps from one city to the next. “In love, the rules are meant to be broken,” “Los Angeles Sonnet” begins. Playing fast and loose with the conventions of a verse form allows for a performance of being unbothered by eros: “In role-play and foreplay, I break character / and make things as unsexy as possible.”
But between each sonnet and the next there also appears an erasure of the sonnet we’ve just read. As words are stripped away, nonchalance also fades, leaving in its wake something hotter and raw. “Paris Sonnet” is addressed to a misogynist:
On the facing page, the erasure recasts the poem’s final three lines:
If the original poem maintains clarity and distance from the experience, the erasure betrays the messy swelter of ambivalence that persists. No longer is this man “just the cruelest person I have loved”—now he is also revealed to be, simply, “the person I loved.” Both statements have a claim to truth; cities are built upon their ruins.
The geographic mode gives Fernandes a way to spatialize and examine the life lived. But it serves another end, too, in what I consider to be the book’s most moving poems. In those, 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.
In such moments, Fernandes remakes our understanding of what it means to be in any place at all. Take the title of one particularly uncanny poem, “In Death, We Met in Scotland.” Is that first “in” the same as the second? The poem dislocates us just as surely as a charismatic stranger on a plane moved the poet; its human figures have been “distorted / by afterlife”; setting is at once specified and otherworldly. From that vantage, imaginations become porous and a kind of time travel is suddenly possible:
The genius of a moment like this lies in the way it conjures, beneath the figuration of something like a dream, the “velvet livingness” (the poem’s own phrase) of an unwitnessed and therefore speculative past. Its reality may exist “in death,” “in Scotland,” or “in Oregon,” but it is buried beneath layers of sleep, and excavated only within the space of the poem.
Megan Fernandes’s “I Do Everything I’m Told,” Reviewed
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