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Its poems span thousands of miles, as a masterful crown of sonnets starts in Shanghai, then moves through Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Palermo, Paris, and Philadelphia—with a speaker who travels solo, adventures with strangers, struggles with the parameters of sexuality, and speculates on desire. Across four sections, poems navigate the terrain of queer, normative, and ambiguous intimacies with a frank intelligence: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you.” Strangers, ancestors, priests, ghosts, the inner child, sisters, misfit raccoons, Rimbaud, and Rilke populate the pages. Beloveds are unnamed, and unrealized desires are grieved as actual losses. The poems are grounded in real cities, but also in a surrealist past or an impossible future, in cliché love stories made weird, in ordinary routines made divine, and in the cosmos itself, sitting on Saturn’s rings looking back at Earth. When things go wrong, Fernandes treats loss with a sacred irreverence: “Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.”","forthcoming":false,"isbn13":"9781953534880","publication_date":"20230620","publisher":"Zando","slug":"i-do-everything-i-m-told","subtitle":"","title":"I Do Everything I'm Told"},"discovery":{"categories":{"all":[{"bisac_code":"POE023020","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Love Poetry","score":0.8329,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"POE023010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Poetry About Death","score":0.8326,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"POE023040","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Place Poetry","score":0.8294,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"hint":[{"bisac_code":"POE023020","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Love Poetry","score":0.8329,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"POE023010","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Poetry About Death","score":0.8326,"source":"bisac_hint_model"},{"bisac_code":"POE023040","confidence_band":"medium","label":"Place Poetry","score":0.8294,"source":"bisac_hint_model"}],"publisher":[{"bisac_code":"POE005010","confidence_band":"high","label":"American Poetry","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"POE023010","confidence_band":"high","label":"Poetry About Death","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"},{"bisac_code":"POE023040","confidence_band":"high","label":"Place Poetry","score":1,"source":"onix_publisher_code"}]},"genres":[{"label":"Love Poetry","score":0.8329,"slug":"love-poetry"},{"label":"Poetry About Death","score":0.8326,"slug":"poetry-about-death"},{"label":"Place Poetry","score":0.8294,"slug":"place-poetry"}],"reader_fit":["For readers interested in poetry about queer and ambiguous intimacies.","For readers drawn to poems of desire and urban wandering."],"related_lists":[],"series":null,"similar_books":[{"authors":["Bianca Stone"],"book_id":"9781951142971","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781951142971.jpg?v=aad66e3a55fa075d","score":0.7301,"title":"What Is Otherwise Infinite","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781951142971"},{"authors":["Christi Steyn"],"book_id":"9781524873820","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781524873820.jpg?v=58322d9333f3df2f","score":0.7299,"title":"What the Moon Gave Her","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781524873820"},{"authors":["Sasha Debevec-McKenney"],"book_id":"9781324110675","cover_image_url":"https://img.bookfrontier.com/9781324110675.jpg?v=83b6e52d597e7bde","score":0.7185,"title":"Joy Is My Middle Name","url":"https://bookfrontier.com/books/9781324110675"},{"authors":["Iain S. 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