Description: 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, González's poems are a crescendo on the page. Part ecstatic elegy, part spell, this is a betwixt poetics, a kaleidoscopic, disruptive, and meditative work.
Review Quotes: "India Lena González's debut is made of exhilarating body
language. Her serpentine stanzas, upper- and lowercase characters, and bold exclamations move
like Bill T. Jones dancing to Keith Haring's brushstrokes, like Alvin Ailey dancing to
lines of June Jordan, like The Woman Warrior dancing
with Sister Outsider. Joan Didion once said, 'Style is character.' González's virtuosic style reveals not only depth of character, it
reveals depth of spirit. Her poems are made of capacious, irreducible energy. fox woman get out! is unforgettable." -- Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and
Future Assassin
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"González's 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 a parda--one 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 González's dynamic fusion and fission
of personhood isn't 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 it's guaranteed to leave 'the pink of your
brain a throb.'" -- Timothy Donnelly,
author of Chariot