“The poet’s blend of irreverence, pathos, and humor works brilliantly in these pages full of winning allusions to Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Rilke, Jimmy Stuart, the cosmos, and K-pop. These candid and charismatic poems are full of life, existential questions, and unexpected turns of phrase.”

“For Fernandes…place is not desire’s terminus. Instead, the names of cities allow her to drop pins on a map of desire, to create a spatial record of an erotic life, its traffic, its compulsions…. exists something like a constellation…As words are stripped away, nonchalance also fades, leaving in its wake something hotter and raw…The geographic mode gives Fernandes a way to spatialize and examine the life lived… geography paradoxically points to places off the map, not to real life but to potential life, to places that can be inhabited only in the poems…transforms verse into multiverse.”

“Fernandes’s poems are loving and messy but always precise, her insights the kind that make you reevaluate your entire life. This book captures Fernandes at her most mature, exciting, and brave. I Do Everything I’m Told is a perfect entry point to Fernandes’s captivating and irreverent style.”

“Good Boys speaks to our shared knowledge that things cannot go on as they are and yet, day by day, we are going on. Fernandes explores what it feels like to live a life organized by risk, the ordinary wagers and debts we make in our attachments to the people, places, and ideas that we love, our promises to ourselves and others:… The poems demonstrate an intelligent handling of form, disrupting convenient distinctions between the neatness of intellect and the chaos of feeling.”

“Good Boys is a firecracker book full of sharp, imaginative, heart-full poems about tarot, running in the suburbs, goats, cities, nuclear fallout, and bigger things like identity, family, race, and feminism. If Broad City and Carmen Maria Machado had a poetry baby, it would be Good Boys.”

“Her fresh, embracing imagination attends to several continents, many languages and cultures, with the originality of one who looks at a piano from below, seeing the ‘woody spirit of the instrument,’ its cavern and brackets, attentive to the sound of ‘the chimptas, fire gongs with bells’ and ‘the swampy Goa.’”