India Lena Gonzalez's debut is made of exhilarating body language. Her serpentine stanzas, upper- and lowercase characters, and bold exclamations move like Bill T. Jones dancing to Keith Haring's brushstrokes, like Alvin Ailey dancing to lines of June Jordan, like The Woman Warrior dancing with Sister Outsider. Joan Didion once said, 'Style is character.' Gonzalez's virtuosic style reveals not only depth of character, it reveals depth of spirit. Her poems are made of capacious, irreducible energy. fox woman get out! is unforgettable. - Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
What a sparkling debut! These exuberant lyrics ransack the seemingly fixed boundaries of racial hierarchies and labels, holding space for a transcendent, ever-singing, new voice. By turns playful, heartbroken, and searching, these poems abound with technical virtuosity, exulting in the mysteries of heritage, home, and hope. - Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia
Gonzalez's spectacular debut is a pageant of ancestral root-digging, ego-tripping, interspecies shape-shifting, straight talk, tall talk, talking with the dead, and talking back to 'the gold-toothed hag that is america.' She writes as a parda-one of 'the mixed bloods whose ancestry could almost never be accurately described' (or, as she later puts it, 'the people-with-too-many-ancestors-inside-of-us')-and also as a twin, challenging cultural assumptions about identity and individuality just by being who she is. While it would be wrong to suggest that Gonzalez's dynamic fusion and fission of personhood isn't also marked with longing ('i would like to know where to place myself') and pain ('will you please just skin me already / like one of them foxes'), what it manifests as is an extravaganza of poetic language, political critique, bursts of bardolatry and modern dance and speculative folklore, all presented in exquisite, mercurial hybrid forms. This is a work of great urgency, brilliance and valor, and it's guaranteed to leave 'the pink of your brain a throb.' - Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot
