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
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.