Book Launch: Megan Fernandes – Good Boys w/ Alexei Perry Cox and Joshua Neves

Poet Megan Fernandes celebrates the release of her new book, Good Boys. She’ll be joined by Alexei Perry Cox and Joshua Neves.

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 barstools 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 doomed: 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.

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MEGAN FERNANDES is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015). Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize (2018), the Saturnalia Book Prize (2018), and is forthcoming with Tin House Books in February 2020. Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College and teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.

ALEXEI PERRY COX is the author of the poetry collection Under Her. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction works have appeared in publications such as The Puritan, Vallum, Matrix, Cosmonauts Avenue, Lemonhound and The Beijinger. Excerpts of her forthcoming manuscript Finding Places to Make Places have been printed, often in different iterations, in The Fiddlehead (Fredericton), carte-blanche (Montreal) Hart House Review (Toronto), Contemporary Verse 2 (Winnipeg), Headlight Anthology (Montreal), and Journal Safar (جورنال سفر), Rusted Radishes and Makhzin (مخزن) in Beirut. She is finishing this manuscript and parenting two wondrous and very wee young ones named Isla and Ilham.

JOSHUA NEVES is Canada Research Chair and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) lab at Concordia University (Montréal). His research centers on digital media, cultural and political theory, and problems of development and legitimacy. He is the author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (2020), and co-editor of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (2017).