fox woman get out!

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.

Excerpt from "fox woman saunters back" 

    i am loose-limbed         woman

sudden on my black-tipped toes     fine ears and underfur 

wind between trees 

i’ve been stuck in this viridescent landscape 

a hazy film where i strike along the base of forest 

where my cunning becomes feminine 

i am praying for all the bodies

i am asking for light 

i am asking to get out of this verdant dreamscape 

i did not mean to outrun your gun 

with your eyes fixed on my snout 

you wanted flattened skull and underfur 

i did not mean to scream 

the way a woman does in distress 

i did not mean to ravage your inner flesh 

i am praying for all the bodies 

i am asking for light 

i will not wound you again 

i am too many 

       trees between wind 

long jagged teeth 

       someone’s reddish brown love

Praise for fox woman get out!

“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

“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

“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

Publication Date: 09/12/2023

ISBN: 978-1-950774-98-2

© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2023