India Lena González’s Fox Woman Get Out!

Fox Woman Get Out! is India Lena González’s debut poetry collection from BOA Editions, but it feels like this work has been in the making her whole life. 

This collection is one of the best examples of an exploration of the Jungian “Self” that I’ve seen recently. That is, González asserts and re-asserts herself over and over again until there is a kaleidoscope of selves. Consider the amount of “I am” statements made throughout the collection:

i am sour meat

from “we n’ de ya ho”

i am a perpetual pardon

from “una parda, which is me”

i am clov with post-apocalyptic limp

from “Act! pose with fingers as though cigarette (puff puff)”

i can’t be red nails that glisten like cheap lava

from “PAPI: the swelling of scars in heat”

i am also a fine-tuned alcoholic who cannot endure the gold-toothed hag that is america.

from “SANTIAGO SEIJAS FERNÁNDEZ PEREZ…ALCANTARA”

i am mountain after
fire

and

i am young-/horse-so-young

from “YOUNG-HORSE-SO-YOUNG”

i am a very small black woman

so small in fact

my color has faded

from “I TOO WANT TO EAT THE WORLD” and the poem titled “I’M A BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK TAN WOMAN”.

All of this is only in the first section–the first 33 pages. Over and over, Gonzalez’s poems assert the self and deftly navigates that self through history, identity, and social mores. She takes contradictions, holds them, and puts them down as needed, as in “afterwor(l)d”:

with the (w)ringing of self something kin to silence


he(a)r(t) knowledge  : i have died by other names


the ritual of our collective rebirth , still not the reality


we start for the last time there is solace in that


we start by laying down the self proper then we let it go that


heaviness

Image of "afterwor(l)d lines noted above in the original formatting.

Are we ringing or wringing? Is it “her” knowledge or “heart” knowledge? Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it’s no longer pertinent anymore. Perhaps, once we “[lay] down the self proper” we simply are. We simply exist without the wrestle of seemingly oppositional ideas.

Fox Woman Get Out! has me anticipating González’s next collection. I look forward to seeing what else she brings. We’ve seen how she has navigated her own selves with such fierceness and passion that I also look forward to seeing how she handles what occurs outside her center.

Fox Woman Get Out! by India Lena González



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Mural by Mahmoud Darwish and translated by John Berger and Rema Hammami

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