fox woman get out!

(Paperback)

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Take the body and split it wide open. Fill it with light. See the multiple interiors, the layered death, the familial mythology, the throb and splendor of being, the shedding of the body altogether: this is fox woman get out!

Traveling from the corporeal to the cosmic, from life to death and back again, fox woman get out!is a full-throated performance of humanity in search of truth, ancestry, and artistic authenticity. Moving through themes of lineage, twinship, femininity and masculinity, reclamation of Indigeneity, dance, gender roles, and longing, Gonzlezs poems are a crescendo on the page.

Part ecstatic elegy, part spell, this is a betwixt poetics, a kaleidoscopic, disruptive, and meditative work.

Reviews

India Lena Gonzlezs debut is made of exhilarating body language. Her serpentine stanzas,upper- and lower-case characters, and bold exclamations move like Bill T. Jones dancing toKeith Harings brushstrokes, like Alvin Ailey dancing to lines of June Jordan, like WomanWarrior dancing with Sister Outsider. Joan Didion once said, 'Style is character.' Gonzlezsvirtuosic style reveals not only depth of character, it reveals depth of spirit. Her poems are madeof 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

"Gonzlezs 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 apardaone 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 Gonzlezs dynamic fusion and fission of personhood isnt 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 its guaranteed to leave 'the pink of your brain a throb.'"

Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot

Author Bio

India Lena Gonzlez is a poet, editor, and artist. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University (BA) and received her MFA from NYUs Creative Writing program. While at NYU she served as a writing instructor for undergraduates and received a Writers in the Public Schools fellowship enabling her to teach literature to middle school students via Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her work is published in American Chordata, The Brooklyn Review, Lampblack, PANK, Pigeon Pages, and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, India is also a professionally trained dancer, choreographer, and actor. fox woman get out! is her debut poetry collection. She lives in Harlem.