I Do Everything I'm Told

A TIME Best Book of 2023 Moving. . . .irresistible. . . .Transforms verse into multiverse.The New Yorker Restless, contradictory, and witty, Megan Fernandes I Do Everything Im 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 Philadelphiawith 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: Its better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they cant 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 clich love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturns 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 dont always get to ask why.