OUT OF PLACE

Megan Fernandes's map of desire.

- KAMRAN JAVADIZADEH

Where, in a poem, is "here"? SupW pose a poem depicts a scene. When you read it, do you feel yourself transported there? Or do you feel in the presence of the poet at her desk, recalling the scene and telling you about it?

For Megan Fernandes, "here" often seems to designate a city. There's New York City, where she lives, but also Mumbai, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Guatemala City, Madrid, Lisbon, Palermo, Philadelphia, Miami, Venice, Dar es Salaam, White Plains, Phoenix, Zurich, Vienna, and London: twenty cities named across the forty-nine poems of her third collection, "I Do Everything I'm Told" (Tin House). The book bears the dedication "For the restless." Fernandes, who comes from a Goan family by way of Tanzania, counts herself among them.

And yet the proliferation of these cities imbues them with a sense of unreality; the poems don't so much feel set in the cities as gesture toward them from some other, unspecified place. In one poem, which seems to occur in the aftermath of a breakup, Fernandes writes, "There is no home/and nothing to return to, just a series of shadows, partial signs of presence: a flickering." One would be hard-pressed to locate that flickering on a map; its only location seems to be the here and now of lyric enunciation: "I say things and then unsay them. It was love. It was not love. It is raining. It is not raining." In another poem, she addresses a would-be lover with what could well be an address to us: "We put the art between us because the art exists / and we do not."