My Baby First Birthday

by Jenny Zhang

My Baby First Birthday is about existence and non-existence. It’s about being born—without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in this book is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone—really alone, like why was I ever born alone—and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something—skin to skin, animal to animal.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Asian American, Audiobook, Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2020

About the author

Jenny Zhang is an American writer, poet, and prolific essayist based in Brooklyn, New York. One focus of her work is on the Chinese American immigrant identity and experience in the United States. She has published a collection of poetry called Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and a non-fiction chapbook called Hags.

Reviews

[Eileen]

this is serious dumb bitch energy but also filled with so many genuine insights ... not even gonna attempt to intellectualize or *plumb the depths* of its meaning bc it’s so stupid and stupid is so good

[juch · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably will be offputting to some people, and i think at first i had some difficulty getting into jenny zhang's poetry vs. her prose, but then i realized we have the same id. we are both slime queens... a euphemism. most of these poems spoke to me on such a visceral level. i feel very watery, but viscous, these days, sliming through life, between cracks in linoleum. powerful and vulnerable, powerful bc vulnerable -- like a baby? there is so much gross shit in this collection but to be gross is to both powerful (inspire fear, disgust) and vulnerable i guess

the speaker of all these poems feels like someone who has gone thru pain and heartbreak but resists victimhood, seizes babyhood. doesn't feel like defiance as much as frankness/naivete, the confidence/invincibility of someone new to this world: "i would never call myself a survivor just because that skinny little pencil dick went in and then fell out" ("needs revision!") (this line killed me). she is also someone who hurts other ppl, takes from them, feels "free & bad not watching the videos my mom sends me from wenxuecity," is guilty but still takes and it's okay or at least poignant to be a needy baby again, to be "overcome with this need to spend my days sleeping at [my mother's] feet at the edge of her openings" ("little tea party at home")

i don't know if i identify very much with the anxiety over the lack of consent over being born, but it was an interesting thought to hold along proclamations like, "in the end it is almost impossible to say no to more life" ("there is only world")

i also didn't love as much the poems that addressed some white/rich person or person w more power. they would have larger political critiques but i guess felt odd to center those on some interpersonal interaction? and i guess i just found the denial of victimhood, seizing of babyhood themes more poignant. but maybe there's some connection there i'm not seeing. i did love the line "my instincts are nowhere close to liberation which is why i care most about my family in queens and my other fam in the old country," framing political impulses w selfish humanity ("ymca")

i am so inspired by how unselfconscious this collection was!!! there's a line about "giv[ing] up the language I was born into" and this is a cliche used often by diaspora poets about "mother tongues" or whatever but zhang is referring to baby language, the raw language and feelings and potential of "goo goo"

some of the poems i wanted to be songs ("leetle")

stream slime queen hehehe

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)]

i honestly gave this collection a chance but the first few poems are by just too florid for me. zhang goes out of the way to be gross, perhaps mistaking vulgarity for substance. there was nothing shocking or raw about these poems. if anything, i found their desperate attempts at being edgy and gritty kind of pathetic. this collection is giving me '13-yr-old just got into swearing' energy and i don't want to be here for it.
anyway, just to give you an idea of what i'm talking about, here is the first poem:

if there is an august
there is an august
I would probably write every day
but some days I get caught up
rubbing my pussy
checking for pimples
green ones pop on their own
when I need to cum
or when I'm flicking cum out
beautiful white globs that dry mid-air
I would be lazier than this

or we have one that goes on like this:

to give pencils to mothers
who are incarcerated
they can take those pencils and break them
in their stupid cunts
I bail out everyone of those cunts

and a few lines later we get this:

my detachable pussy is not afraid of being
approachable by a man late at night
who is like hey girl
you don't need none of that
you look good without makeup
and I feel very sexy
because my cunt gets leashed to a tree
and waves hello to everyone

disclaimer: i did not understand these poems nor do i claim to.
if you are fan of zhang please don't @ me. my inability to appreciate her poems is entirely subjective. if you are interested in this collection and were not put off by the above snippets...well, go for it! i'm sure there is an audience for this collection, it just so happens that i am not part of it.

[The Artisan Geek]

14/3/20
Thank you Tin House for gifting me a copy of this poetry collection! :D

28/2/20
Really excited to read this poetry collection!!! :D

You can find me on
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[Sarah :) · Rating 2 out of 5]

jenny zhang should should collaborate with eve peyser . (Look up eve peyser and watch her standup to know what I mean.)

There were like two poems i enjoyed in here. I suppose I get the grossness as subversive thing, but it was repetitive. If a man wrote these, I would be uncomfortable around him. But I'm uncomfortable around most men anyway, so that's not saying much.
I think she's probably an awesome person, but her writing strikes me as forced. She knows a lot of words, but she doesn't have much to say here. The poems were also terribly low effort. Imagine milk and honey, but crude with a dash of 2016 alt-girl.
It's good for a laugh, anyway. There are definitely people who will like it, but I'm not them.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw, filthy, angry, beautiful, and awesome poems. Really liked this collection; the images and curses and anger kept shocking me awake. One of the more tame examples comes from the aptly-named 'ted talk':

all the people with phones
don't think twice about buying onboard wifi on their
way to the latest Caribbean island still recovering from last year's hurricanes
would it be so wrong to wish
everyone with global entry be grounded until extinction is off the table
I don't think I can date another
digital nomad or a normie with a dog who doesn't know
what it's like
to be too poor to buy their way
out of disaster
why do the rich treat blame
like its' an obscenity
or a fossil
is it because they hate seeing blood
think they are noble for taking
quick little showers
and using silicone at the farmer's market. I have never sen
someone forgive themselves as elaborately as the wealthy
everyone who paid for their wellness
is infecting the rest of us

**Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Nuha · Rating 2 out of 5]

In an attempt to be subversive and push the boundaries of poetry, Zhang's first collection is interesting but feels overly drawn out. She uses baby language, perhaps a play on the whole "I'm baby" movement, to talk about sex, depression, family, etc. For me, it was almost offputting to see the use of "goo" every other word. Maybe it's just not a collection I gel with.

[Georgia]

I extremely did not get this lol. Poetry... tough stuff

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

ted talk

money will build anywhere
there’s a view or a coastline
all those tangled shrubs and thorny bushes
your ancestors cut through centuries ago
to claim in the name of a queen
and a king with foul smelling hair
these days even the ecotone
between the living and the dying
has to be privatized & sold at auction
all the steps between next year
and the first human year ever recorded
melted so flagrantly it became stylish to be poetic
for the end of the world
everyone’s collecting coins on every interface
a thousand identical posts about 2019
being the year of paper straws
and reusable cups
indigo dyeing from Kyoto
is the new 36 hours in Tbilisi
all the people with phones
don’t think twice about buying onboard wifi
on their way to the latest Caribbean island
still recovering from last year’s hurricanes
would it be so wrong to wish
everyone with global entry be grounded
until extinction is off the table
I don’t think I can date another
digital nomad or a normie with a dog
who doesn’t know what it’s like
to be too poor to buy their way
out of disaster
why do the rich treat blame
like it’s obscenity
or a fossil
is it because they hate seeing blood
think they are noble for taking
quick little showers
and using silicone at the farmer’s market
I have never seen someone forgive themselves
as elaborately as the wealthy
everyone who paid for their wellness
is infecting the rest of us
yes I am sick sick sick
and want to sterilize all the ruinous overseers
though it is not like me to dream so much
I have managed to hoard something
that cannot be replicated
it will die when I die
let no one say we didn’t try
to let a different kind of  life bloom
and let no one say we didn’t touch
what was there from the beginning

[Laura Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

My friends are constantly raving about Jenny Zhang, so I thought I’d try her new collection out. Zhang attempts to make poetry more accessible and casual here, while also making it less accessible. It’s quite remarkable how the poems shift before your very eyes, one moment offering clarity and another throwing the veil over your eyes. There’s occasional nonsense, and it’s also occasionally brutal. It’s vulgar and violent, sometimes for a reason, and it tends to avoid the lyrical. Maybe poetry doesn’t need to be lyrical to be powerful. And this is a powerful collection, one that examines sexual assault, race, mothers, ice skating, gender, the body, sex, sickness, war, and class. I tend to enjoy poetry that’s more lyrical, so I didn’t really enjoy these poems, but maybe they’re not meant to be enjoyed. I also was thrown off by the structure and the way a train of thought could change abruptly, sometimes several times within a poem. All in all, these are quick, punchy poems that are quick enough to read through, but I won’t be picking this up again. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don’t know if the author considers herself among the school of “contemporary minimalist poets” (rupi kaur and amanda lovelace type collections is what I have in mind when I say this) but this book reads similarly to that genre. it’s bright and surprising in many places; also does a lot of hammering motif into your head without the economy of language to make it incisive every time.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. I wish I had Jenny Zhang's brain.

[Leyla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can totally see why Mitski loves this book, it’s exactly the odd poetry x female rage aesthetic you can find in her music.

For me, I really liked some parts and am far too prude for others..

My favourite poem was “a troll”

“When it comes to people who own land, they always wanna be at the level of people who don’t- without giving up anything.”

“Im going to let you rant, because I’m going to die soon anyway. I’ll die hearing this and I’ll die holding it in.”

Were my favourite quotes from this poem

[Karla Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess that I didn’t know the magic that is Jenny Zhang until today. But I’m so glad to have been sent an arc of her latest poetry collection. It’s phenomenal, unique, bold, idiosyncratic, and provocative. Zhang dares you to flinch.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

lmao this woman is nasty af

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. The poems are gross and endearing and relatable.

my favorite poem was "your pubes are everywhere"

your pubes are everywhere
when I sleep
they cover me like my mother's blankets
cover me
when I eat
they stay in the gaps between my teeth and I savor them
like I savor dark meat
like I savor endless moments
like I savor the end of eternity
like I savor the meaty bits...


beautiful!

Zhang frequently returns to the "goo goo" and the bodily fluids of her babyness; these lines repeat themselves and find a way of seeming at once both incredibly juvenile and deeply lived, often in dialogue with herself, her mother, & lovers.

From "goo goo water"

goo goo to the whales who were goo goo to the krill
who were goo goo to the sea urchins who were goo
goo to the goo that live underwater like me

Altogether a good read.

[Lizramona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very weird read but it made so much sense to me.
I liked that Jenny talks about existential dread as something she is slowly coming to terms with. She recognizes that she has to live (for whatever sake) despite all the disgustingness of depression and capitalism. I enjoyed how unapologetic she is about her dissatisfaction but still manages to communicate her hope for a better life because she deserves it- we all deserve it!

Bonus: this collection contains the only poem with themes of climate change that I’ve ever enjoyed.

Also, as I was reading this, all I could think about was Mitski and how a lot of the poems sound much like her music- come to find out she rated it😜.

[jj · Rating 5 out of 5]

if uuu like goo and pubes, read this book!!

[Mon · Rating 3 out of 5]

odd

[Calla · Rating 5 out of 5]

yah yah yah yah!

[Delia Rainey · Rating 4 out of 5]

a poem is a vessel for goo

[Josh L · Rating 5 out of 5]

obsessed obsessed obsessed obsessed

[rowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

let no one say we didn’t try
to let a different kind of life bloom
and let no one say we didn’t touch
what was there from the beginning

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The line “not everyone can be sloppy and get away with it” from Zhang’s poem “communication ≠ connection” states plainly this book’s challenge to itself and to the reader. Is Zhang one of those people who can be sloppy and get away with it, and will the reader try to stop her?

The challenge of sloppiness as an aesthetic is that trying to achieve it can be self-defeating: the more one strives to produce an effect of disorganization, the more a latent structure of organized thoughts and motifs begins to coagulate and obtrude through the mess. Aiming at spontaneity will not work: sloppiness is not the same thing as spontaneity, first of all, and spontaneity is meant to feel fresh and emergent, while sloppiness is all residue and rot.

In other words, it is genuinely an aesthetic challenge to write sloppy poetry, and perhaps (another paradox) the only way to evaluate an author’s success at achieving this effect is to monitor the reader for signs of disgruntlement and disengagement. Such a response can be seen in one Goodreads reviewer’s complaint that Zhang confuses vulgarity for sophistication. I don’t think she actually does, but I do think she wants to tempt the reader into precisely that judgment. “This is just crude” would be the most desirable reaction possible—crude does, after all, mean “raw” and has a connotation of rankness or viscosity. Crudity is sloppiness.

But Zhang says that not everyone can get away with being sloppy. Does that suggest that some people’s efforts at sloppiness fall short of the mark, or that they succeed too well, that their sloppiness was so energetic that it engaged the reader almost against their will? I think of the dark allure of Frederick Seidel’s poetry like that—he can’t get away with sloppiness because his readers know they are being toyed with, that Seidel at his most repellent is also Seidel at his most aggressively domineering. Sloppiness is far more passive in its repugnance: it is not trying very hard to disgust you—it just does.

Zhang achieves this passivity by returning again and again to both infantile fixations (anal and oral) and pubescent self-obsession (genital). This very loose borrowing of Freudian stage theory is not ironized but it also does not ask for the reader’s commitment: we aren’t required to play along. Zhang exposes these fixations as kinks—they are not meant to be mimetic (to represent something in the world or in the mind) but purely performative, something close to a gloopy, chaotic ritual. (There is a recurrent theme of semen replacing both communion wafers and the waters of baptism as sacramental substances.)

All in all, I found this collection of poems to be deeply intellectually rewarding and pleasurably intense aesthetically. I would not recommend it, though. You will have to decide whether or not you want to accept it on its own terms.

[Shy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley for this book.

now...I'm all for crazy poetry but this stuff is high grade crazy. All the author talks about is c***s. I understand that the book is supposed to be a rebel against the patriarchy or something but this is just too much for me. I stopped reading at about page 50 because i couldn't really understand where the collection was going. I'm not saying I don't like her style of writing, I just don't really like what she wrote about. Giving it a one star because i do like that she wrote from the heart and used non-traditional words and phrases. I also learned what Seppuku is.

[OjoAusana · Rating 2 out of 5]

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* I'm going to start out saying i don't read much poetry but have been trying to, so i don't think i understand most of this book.

that being said. WTF did i just listen to? i forced myself to listen to the whole thing even though i thought i was going to go insane listening to "nothing. nothing. nothing" 30x straight or the one where her uncle? gave her a UTI and she groans and groans and groans in increasingly annoying tones and lengths for like 3 minutes.

Unsure why everything was so sexual, a lot of it was just flat out disgusting (like wiper her fat c*nt lips on her poems leaving a mark on it? wtf). i had to stop several times because i was just so grossed out, like "my dads stretched as*hole* why? what is that supposed to mean?

the only things i could understand was the racist references, but everything else clearly went far over my head. Got "kid trying to be vulgar to get attention" vibes, which as someone who can say f**k 10x in a one word sentence, i'm shocked to find myself saying any of this.

imo the audiobook was flat out horrible and annoying, i don't think it translated well to audio vs what it looks like on paper and made it feel jumbled and confusing to me.

[Shasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

really loved Zhang's first collection years ago, Dear Jenny We Are All Find, and she's come a long way since...but I don't know what happened– it's just not working for me anymore. I think this book of poetry was trying to be many things and it failed to deliver anything specific. the narrator's feeling of resentment and anger should have been relatable, but fell short of anything substantial.

I think you have to be into a certain amount of crude to appreciate this body of work. is being gross subversive now? anyway it was giving Rupi Kaur but in a c**t, d**k, c*m kind of way. yes there were a couple gems in there but most of the descriptors were needlessly vulgar throughout, making it hard to figure out if there was anything the narrator was really getting at. The language felt forced in general, idk, it kind of reminds me of her novel, Sour Heart, which another one I had to put down because it was just too much, and not in a good way. some folks might understand the mindblowing revelation behind the repetitive 'goo goo' baby talk she employs, but i am unfortunately not one of them.

[Priya · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so stunning. Zhang funnels her anger, disgust, and frustration into each bleeding word. I felt like this book let me be angry along with Zhang - it felt like we were both screaming and indulging in every awful emotion TOGETHER! I felt like I could be spiteful and unfair and mean and stupid and mad and inarticulate and raw. We were goo-goo gah-gah-ing IN UNISON! There's no pretense, no dancing around what I wish I felt, there was simply feeling. Her poems take on capitalism and white supremacy and patriarchy but she attaches the body to these systems, she gives them corporeality. She explores the grotesque, she wants us to stare right at the dirty thing and not be ashamed of ourselves for liking it. A lot of the poems were weird and bizarre. But in an attempt not to intellectualize the poems too much, I often let the weirdness of them wash over me. I reveled in the nonsense! It felt genuine and ego-less and funny.
Zhang once said in an interview with the Poetry Foundation: "I think, as a society, it makes us uncomfortable...when people who have traditionally been understood through the lens of victim-hood act like brats." And that sentiment is deeply explored in this book. Who gets to be seen as a victim? Who is deserving of sympathy? Why do we have to hearken back to babyhood, to being baby, to being seen as daughters or in relation to our mothers, to be innocent, to be deserving of love? What happens when the oppressed and how they articulate their trauma isn't palatable? Is in fact gross and awful and too real? "it turns you on / until you know me" Zhang says ("i feel nothing but hatred hatred hatred hatred"). YEAH!
Anyway, read this book! I'll be thinking about these poems forever!

[Sof · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I leak blood memory and fade badly / is there some magic in knowing me?"

I kept thinking of julia kristeva's essay on the abject whilst reading this collection; an obvious connection, but one I notice always protrudes from my psyche every time I read Jenny Zhang. I've worshipped her work since I read that piece she wrote on Rookie about manic pixie dream girlhood as a non-white, non "normative" girl. This book pushes back. This is not even so much a collection as it is a monster, raucous, fanged, blood-lush, and needy. Language is a frontier, an opening, which Zang constantly renegotiates and splinters into precisely crafted pieces, leaving the reader to tear through the sharp edges with their own grit and gutsiness. She doesn't let us let her do the work for us. here is riotous, demanding luminescence; here is so much sharp tenderness and rage, here the marginalized body is not a site to visit or try on but rather a poetry in itself, here the incessant, specific fetishizations that whiteness produces and propagates are visible and breathtakingly, brutally articulated!! It's a monstrous book because it's alive. Because it's generous and vicious and exhausted and overstuffed with love, with the gross, with the desire to consume oneself one's flesh one's hope one's desire, to consume history and expunge it from our bellies. i just. damn. this is a hell of a book. jenny is!! unparalleled!!!!!

[shelby · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25
Definitely provocative, definitely complex! I struggled with this in the same way I struggled with Elegguas and Dictee, in that I think I am too much of a left brained person for some types of poetry lmao. although I would say both of those works evoked more feeling in me, and were more intentional in their message. I felt as if a lot of the vulgarity and abstraction in these poems was mostly for shock value, which I didn't really appreciate because it was annoying sometimes and made no sense sometimes. But in a way it almost added to the work because it helped deliver more of the raw emotional feeling. When discussing certain topics its almost easier to push the audience away in a 'fuck you' type of gesture, it is very intimate poetry about personal trauma. I was reading this at the same time as I read sour hearts, the author’s debut short story collection. I’m glad I did this as and it helped me contextualize this in her experience, and I might write a better review of this once I get around to finishing that.