Where, in a poem, is "here"? SupW pose 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."
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.