In-Store: I DO EVERYTHING I'M TOLD by Megan Fernandes

Tue Jun 27 2023 at 07:00 pm to 08:30 pm

Women & Children First | Chicago

Women & Children First
Publisher/HostWomen & Children First
In-Store: I DO EVERYTHING I'M TOLD by Megan Fernandes
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In-person event celebrating I DO EVERYTHING I'M TOLD by Megan Fernandes! Megan will be joined by CM Burroughs, Lisa Hiton, & Richie Hofmann
About this Event

Please join us for an in-person event celebrating the release of I DO EVERYTHING I'M TOLD by Megan Fernandes! For this event, Megan will be joined by CM Burroughs, Lisa Hiton, and Richie Hofmann. 

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

“In the absence of love, ritual. / Understand that ritual is a kind of patience, an awaiting and waiting. Keep / waiting, kitten. You will be surprised what you can come back from.”

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.”

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Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, among others. Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told, will be published by Tin House in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a former Yaddo fellow, holds a PhD in English from the University of California, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.

CM Burroughs is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System and Master Suffering, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and L.A. Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.

Lisa Hiton's debut book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize at Tupelo Press. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in New South, Linebreak, The Paris-American, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and LAMBDA Literary among others. She is the founder and producer of the podcast, Queer Poem-a-Day, at the Deerfield Public Library.

Richie Hofmann is the author of two collections of poems, Second Empire and A Hundred Lovers. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he lives in Chicago.

Accessibility: This event is at the bookstore, which is an accessible space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Email [email protected] with questions or to request accommodations. Masks are required for our events.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States

Tickets

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