MEGAN FERNANDES reads from her new poetry collection GOOD BOYS, accompanied by CATHERINE POND and CALLIE SISKEL

Good Boys (Tin House Books)
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.
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.
Catherine Pond's debut collection, Fieldglass, won the Crab Orchard First Book Award in Poetry (judge: Traci Brimhall) in 2019, and is forthcoming with Southern Illinois University Press in 2021. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2013. She is co-founder of the online literary magazine Two Peach (with Julia Anna Morrison). Catherine lives in Los Angeles.
Callie Siskel is the author of Arctic Revival, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Yale Review, and other journals. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature.