Good Boys: Poems

by Megan Fernandes

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. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian Ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Womens, Feminism, Race

116 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 18, 2020

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In these poems, Megan Fernandes confronts the inconsistencies and mixed messages of living both inside and outside of your given identity (female, Indian diaspora, poet) - sometimes with sarcasm, irony, and humor. My favorite is probably "In California, Everything Already Looks Like the Afterlife."

Out from Tin House on February 18th, I had an early copy from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

[A copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review]

This was a slow burn of falling in love with the mastery with which these poems are looped together. The content spanned a wild range, dipping into and across personal identities and society's reactions to them. What really gripped me was the effortless way in which the words navigated around these subjects, dancing over heavy content in a way that felt weightless but left me breathless.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars

This was very close to a 5-star read, but the final section kind of lost me (the first section is so perfect that it more than makes up for it). Still, I bought this collection on a whim from a poet who wasn't on my radar at all and there was a lot to appreciate. What I loved most about Fernandes' poems is that they have a clear, beating heart beneath them. Even as I could admire her technique, I never felt distanced from the poems. I'm really just feeling grateful for the diversity of poetry that I've enjoyed this week because this is one of those collections where you're immediately hit by the uniqueness of the poet's voice. By which I mean, there's a clear signature to her style and she wields it to great effect. The cliché thing to say is that it felt like reading poems from a friend--a very smart, well-read friend who's traveled the world and lived to tell about it (I will here insert a light CW for brief suicidal ideation). I'm excited to revisit these poems soon and look forward to hearing more from Fernandes' modern & refreshing voice in the future.

A side note: I had a delightful experience wherein I realized I had read one of the poems in this collection previously in Columbia Poetry Review. Me: "Wow, weird, I remember reading a similar poem about senior coloring hour at the library... wait, this is the same poem!" So I guess Fernandes actually was on my radar, because I loved that poem when I first read it, but as often happens when I'm reading a lit mag I forget to remind myself later on to seek out the poet's full collection. Glad that happenstance brought me to order it after all.

[Chris Newens · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic and urgent collection that effortlessly blends high poetic register and allusion with direct, contemporary language and feeling. Full of blistering individual works, I particularly enjoyed the title piece, Conversion, and Modern Nation-States -- also, While I Keep Making the Room Brighter, which is a beautifully subtle love poem. Really, though, it was the book in its totality that I enjoyed most. There's a sense of rootlessness and genuine searching which all the poems here confront in different ways, with a real sense of the size and complexity of the world present on almost every page.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection. Fernandes writes with terrific incision, capturing so many aspects of what it means to be alive in the 21st Century -- not because of technology or anything like that, but because of life itself. There is wit and charm and pathos and sadness in these poems and I devoured them in two sittings.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Also, ten stars for the cover, it makes me smile every time I see it.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“[…] when you are a girl, all you see is another girl
and when you are a woman, all you see is history
careening towards a girl whom you cannot protect.” thank u megan fernandes for killing me

[Jess Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nukemap.com remains my favorite of her poems, but every PoemPageLineWordBreak hits me in my guts. Read this book, and give it to everyone you know whether they’re a white person who wants to tell everyone they grew up poor or if you’ve had to hear that too many times to count

[Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly unique, honest & most importantly precise.

[Stephanie B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this collection. I learned about this poet because she was part of a reading of someone else I admire, and I wish I could remember which poem she read at that reading as it blew me away to hear her read it which just reminds me of something so interesting about poetry which feels different to me than other types of writing - where an out-loud reading of a poem can sometimes transform it into something new on an entirely different level.

While there are running themes throughout this book - feminism, diaspora - it’s proving difficult for me to make notes on the collection as a whole. The publisher's review above does an great job of this.

Each poem really stood alone to me and deserves multiple reads which I have not done yet, and I am looking forward to. I have many favorites.

The one I’m drawn to the most right now is “How To Have A Baby In The Anthropocene”. It’s existential and amazing, and - as the best poetry does - captures the seemingly uncapturable. Many of the poems in this collection contain ancient references - mostly to classical Greek mythology which are really well done. This one uses a biblical reference. I can't locate it online, and I was going to just quote the ending, but it's just so good that I can't cut it down so here's the entire thing, and you really should go get this book!

"Do it with someone who gets fresh water
not a city kid, but an outlaw
who can diagnose an egg, scale a wall
in the Adirondacks. Have the baby
and survive it. Learn to live
with constant foreshadowing, days dizzy
with anticipation. Befriend the desert
and forest bats and even those eels,
flooding the parking lots,
spun around trees above silver cars.
A dead eel with its dead eyes looks just
as stirring above water, thread into a tree
line.
Have the baby, defer the end.
Get a pediatrician
with a specialty in trapping time,
who can replace a kneecap with sugar
red and full of a synthetic love.
Have a smart kid. Play him Bowie.
Tell him about the '80s. Tell him about
decades
of men, decadent men. Wrap your kid
in a blanket and float him down the Nile
and if it dries out, the Euphrates.
Might as well make it biblical -
as biblical as the sky on the run.
Birth a fugitive. Let him drift
under highways, listen
to conspiracies about salmon
with gold-flaked eyes,
fictions of the sea.
Let him remember your belly’s
lullabies of hell, still a sweet thought
about a birthday
when birthdays were not days of blame.
Tell him about cities
and how you lived there, once.
And something called an intersection
where you slipped your hand into
someone else’s on Boulevard Villette
and gazed towards a skyline of soot,
mistaking it for a future.
Don’t be melodramatic.
It is the worst kind of defeat.
It is the opposite of parenthood.
Be a parent, for god’s sake.
Tell him about the earth
and more lovingly, its tumbling
civilizations, rolling over
one another, gathering
and gathering,
gathering into his exact
hallowed form.”

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, I would say read Fernandes's book on an individual poem basis. Or maybe that was my entry point. Because each poem is very involved with its occasion, with its subject, with the poet's struggle to understand what she thinks and why she thinks about this subject. It's like the poem's job is to build context and the poet writing the poem recognizes how she struggles within that context. What does it mean to feel enclosed in a room, talk about buying fabric for curtains in Tribeca. Which she does in "Fabric in Tribeca." But, then, the poem offers this insight into containment, and dressing your containment, and even being born into it.

But, then, my reading started to expand out from there. And I would say the book encourages this. Fernandes speaks often to feeling American culture observe her based on her identity, imposing a context on her. And, for my reading, the context I see individual poems particularizing (a poem about giving flowers, a poem about web sites that let visitors simulate a nuclear attack), and then the poet's struggle against that context feels like a formal statement about living within that culturally imposed context. Like there's this way to read the book where it performs struggle, and it articulates the many modes struggle takes on.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My sadness is very adult. You can bring it to places / in public and it will not make a scene.” Good Boys, the brilliant, expansive poetry collection from Megan Fernandes, is a formally exciting venture, an eclectic mix of poems exploring race and gender, city life and modern existentialism, maturity and murkiness. Her “messy feminist rage”, as the jacket blurb promises, is engaging, glorious and bristling. I knew I needed to read a full collection as soon as a friend sent her poem ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ to me; filled with “the laugh tracks of the dead”, resounding with such declarations as “I hate the violence of insight”, Fernandes imbues into every poem an unmistakable voice, yet maintains variety and wonder on each page, each line and crossbow-chosen word. Her ingenious and bold knack for language radiates in poems like ‘Regret Is a Blue Dive’, ‘How Have You Prepared for Your Death?’, ‘The Poet Holds a Gun’, ‘Church Girls’, ‘How to Have a Baby in the Anthropocene’, the titular poem, and the exquisite opener, ‘In Which I Become A Mythology and Also, Executed’. I adore the wild and relatable desperation with which Fernandes flings all her thoughts and fears at the page and the craft of arranging them: “i was just a dog. i wasn’t even that good.”

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely inhaled Fernandes' 2023 release "I Do Everything I'm Told" so it was only a matter of time before I dug into her back catalog. What made me think I should do that via the library is a mystery to all of us because clearly, CLEARLY, I need my own copy of this. It's just as amazeballoons as her newer collection. I may have said this before, but I straight up feel like maybe she's my soulmate poet. It feels like she has somehow peeped into my head and my heart and dragged out every hidden thing I'd never say and laid it bare on the page. Except for the part where my life has become so wildly doldrum and hers still seems to be quite the globetrotting adventure.

Anywho. Stunning.

Favorites:
Fabric in Tribeca
Amsterdam
Five of Swords
Sonora (what book is she talking about in this poem? Hannah's book?)
The Edward Albee Barn
Rhode Island Wedding

[Astrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of poems. Read this outside waiting for breakfast in Black Mountain, and finished it this morning, also at breakfast. Emotional, personal, feminine, fascinating. Favorite poems were in section three. Overall favorites include:
- Bad Habit (pg. 23).
- Five of Swords (pg. 27).
- The Eulogy (pg. 29).
- Running in the Suburbs (pg. 37).
- Regret is a Blue Dive (pg. 39).
- Good Boys (pg. 45).
- Venus, Aged (pg. 52).
- Coloring Hour (pg. 60).
- The Poet Holds a Gun (pg. 73).
- Conversion (pg. 75).
- Scylla and Charybdis (pg. 79).
- Night, The First (pg. 81).
- Rhode Island Wedding (pg. 88).
- In California, Everything Already Looks Like an Afterlife (pg. 98).

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about identity, sexuality, love, desire, and family.

from Amsterdam: "I am a woman and last time, I was a girl / and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl / and when you are a woman, all you see is the history / careering towards a girl whom you cannot protect."

from White People Always Want to Tell Me That They Grew Up Poor: "White people / like to remind you // that you are Indian, not black. // Black people / never say that to you. // they make / a home for you / inside / their archives. // It is like an elegy."

from The Poet Holds a Gun: "The bullet is a simple, adolescent heartache. / When guns go off around you, you wince like a single sheet / and nothing in your body has ever been so simultaneous"

[Lisa Hiton · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of American poetry to come out this year, without a doubt. Fernandes writes poems that unearth the most complex in us. These lyric poems are urgent as ever, full of ferocity, and unequivocal in their flexibility toward our moral capacities. The book's central poem,"Conversion", is a song of our time and of all time. No one will leave this book the same as they entered it.

[peyton hennig]

“I am ruining coloring hour for seniors at the library. I need so many mothers. I am a youngest child. I need all these women between me and the world.”

“We can live without limbs unless they are our siblings.”

[Karla Strand · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tremendous collection of poems centers feminism, racism, and rage in all its imperfections, contradictions and candor. Poet Kaveh Akbar describes it best in one word: “Ferocious.”

[Cecile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong and volatile, well written if a little redundant at times.

[Brittany Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading and rereading. Searing and feminist with a unique international/global angle.

[OK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great ones, some meh ones! A really solid collection. Curious to see how Fernandez’ thinking has since grown.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I loved these!

[reg · Rating 5 out of 5]

first poetry collection of 2024…a good omen

[Chahula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a collection that needs occasional revisiting. They're the kind of poems that "follow you around afterwards..."

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really liked the sound of the blurb for this, but the poems did nothing for me at all sadly. Could be your cup of tea, but it’s not mine.

[Miquela Chudy · Rating 2 out of 5]

this author is too smart and well traveled for me to keep up with her and know what she’s talking about. i like poetry bc it makes me feel things— these poems didn’t make me feel much

[Amara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of poems that progress in their exploration of the speaker’s identity based on family, race, sex, relationships, moments, political and socioeconomic context, and more.

[☆subin☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

clear throughline between this collection and 'i do everything im told' ... even more "incoherant" in a good way i think ? sonically rich, exists between sound poetry and lyric, needs multiple reads to approach some poems
without much thought I'd like to say 'i do everything im told' evoked more visceral reaction but that may change upon rereading

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Megan Fernandes writes like a friend you lost touch with after college then ran into one sunny afternoon in a foreign country and sat down to catch up over coffee. Older, wiser, a little bit jaded but still ready for the rest of the adventure that the voyage requires.

At its core the collection is about navigating Time and Space and each poem plays with time and space to amazing effect. One of the techniques Fernandes uses is to take an event or an image and use it to trigger a surprising juxtaposition to connect a completely different memory or recollection. For example, in “Manchester to Lisbon” a turbulent flight is not a clichéd metaphor for emotional turbulence but instead displays a vivid memory of the narrator’s mother’s stoic attitude in the face of fear.

I love Fernandes’ classical references - pulling in Greek mythology (like The Odyssey) that is familiar to readers - and her moments of intimacy where I felt like I knew the people she was writing about. And cared about them.

So much so, that the aspect I love and the one that makes me despair most is how the poems are haunted - by a ghost or many ghosts. There are so many references to ‘one’ lost to time or space - especially as it pertains to loss across the distance measured by water. The sense of longing across the poems is palpable.

Excellent reading! Enjoy! I read it twice!

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC given by NetGalley for Honest Review

"Good Boys" by Megan Fernandes is an incredibly well written collection of poems and prose about life as a person of color, someone who is mentally ill, and someone just trying to navigate the trials of living. I was impressed by the richness and fullness of each poem, each one colorful and successful in painting a picture for the reader. This is the kind of poetry I personally aspire to write and also enjoy reading. I have already put in an order for my library!

"Regret Is Blue Dive" is my favorite poem from the collection.

The quote that stood out to me: "Depression is and endless Quebec snowfield, it is the Pacific oceans in January, whaleless and deep in soft, cold current."