Details

ISBN-10: 1947793810
ISBN-13: 9781947793811
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publish Date: 05/12/2020
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.80" H

My Baby First Birthday

Paperback

Price: $15.95

Overview

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone–really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone–and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something–skin to skin, animal to animal.

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Reviews
Jenny Zhang will always be one of the most important poets writing today. She consistently and constantly stretches the lyric to its necessary and best intentions, telling it where it only may dream or dare to go.–Dorothea Lasky, author of Milk
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Details

ISBN-10: 1947793810
ISBN-13: 9781947793811
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publish Date: 05/12/2020
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.80" H
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