I Do Everything I’m Told
Megan Fernandes
Reviewed by Kate Stoltzfus
The poet Megan Fernandes dedicates her third book of poetry, out this past June from Tin House, “to the restless.” I Do Everything I’m Told is a collection fiercely devoted to wandering, in which Fernandes invites readers to trace a speaker’s journey across cities and miles in search of comfort, joy, and places to make home.
But one is never lost. Fernandes draws a map for the questions and experiences closest to her heart in ways that feel precisely personal and universal in turn. She believes that poetry, as she writes, “can give form to the formless, / that one can resurrect roads not taken in a line / and give it a name.” No word feels unnecessary. At its core, the collection focuses on relationships—an exacting and innovative take on love, grief, and identity and how all intersect to unravel and remake us. Fernandes oscillates between first and second person, wresting raw and self-possessed reflection from memories that span time and space: the tears that come at a K-pop dance class in Shanghai; the couple she witnesses fighting on Brooklyn subway tracks; the robin eggs she tried to hatch with a hairdryer during childhood; the piano keys she plays for a nurse in early pandemic days.
The middle section of the book dedicates itself to sonnets “of false beloveds,” as the poet recounts travels, breakups, and growth. Each neat sonnet appears whole on one page before scattering like dandelion seeds on the next, fragments mirroring the loss the lines describe. They interrogate, with electric imagery and finely tuned narrative, the challenges and beauties of being entangled with one another. Fernandes also infuses humor into her meditations, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to reflect on her meaning-making: “The muse is mostly a bloodless tool. / A plot device,” she writes. “Don’t take it personally.”
In the end, though, what Fernandes really seems to capture is delight. She does not “track the world by beauty but joy.” Despite loss, she still finds herself writing love poems, she says. And why not? The last poem in the collection, entitled “Tired of Love Poems,” is an apt finale that captures the book’s central message, leaving us with the hope that all this yearning for connection amidst instability is never devoid of meaning:
“But we never tire of them, do we?
We wish to worship more than just each other.
We put a god first, sometimes a tree,
write a sonnet to a bird in the black
of night or offer a light to a stranger
and not call it love. But it is.”