I Do Everything I’m Told, Megan Fernandes

Fernandes was part of the New Voices Festival here in the Spring, and her readings were terrific, and she was so smart and interesting in the panel discussions. The poems were so deeply relatable that I almost couldn’t recognize them as poems, except that they were also formally playful in wonderful ways. I especially enjoyed a sequence of sonnets where not only did various lines jump from one poem to the next, but on each facing page there was a little heap of words from the poem facing opposite; a new creation, seemingly haphazardly put together from a scattered assortment of pieces on the previous page. It reminded me of the refrigerator magnet poems that awakened everyone’s inner poet when I was a teenager, except these are actually good.