My Baby First Birthday

by Jenny Zhang Narrated by Jenny Zhang

Overview

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. It's about existence and nonexistence, about being born-without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people's dreams. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism.



The magic trick in this book is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone-really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone-and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something-skin to skin, animal to animal.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Elisa Gabbert

Zhang's messiness is defiance: a refusal of standards (in America, necessarily white standards) of "beauty" and "quality" and even evidence of effort, a refusal of the burdensome standard of the "model minority." It feels important that some of these poems are extraneous…Cutting My Baby First Birthday down to a typical 70-ish pages would work against its project, an assertion of the overflowing self and a denial of containment.

Dorothea Lasky

"Jenny Zhang will always be one of the most important poets writing today. She consistently and constantly stretches the lyric to its necessary and best intentions, telling it where it only may dream or dare to go."

Refinery29

"These poems ... have felt like a lifeline of sorts. Not because they're unrelated to ever-present concepts like loneliness and longing, but because they deal with those things — as well as love and lust and violence and injustice and life — head-on. Zhang's writing is visceral, urgent, and hot — her poetry is never a distraction, but rather a beautiful, rage-fueled call to arms."

Tommy Pico

"My Baby First Birthday is like performing when you suspect someone is watching vs when you hope someone will pay attention. It's viscous, oozing with anger and humor and sexy, sexy death. I love how it opens and opens and opens itself, exasperated by the world history of contradiction and inequality—yet, despite itself, retains a tender, caring core. This book is literally breathtaking. By the end I had to remind myself to breathe."

Ariana Reines

"Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel and Jenny Zhang wrote My Baby First Birthday, a marvelous book full of cunts, puke, farting oceans, and seppuku, which amounts to an accuracy of feeling. I will probably get in trouble for putting Rabelais in a blurb because almost nobody reads old books or really any books. Jenny Zhang makes me feel alive. Her rage and appetites are unslakable. If everything feels stupid and wrong to you, congratulations: read this book."

TIME

"To read Jenny Zhang is to embrace primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing and rage."

Mitski

"An all-consuming anger had me devouring this book in one sitting. And the book devoured me. We burned together."

The New York Times Book Review

"Rather dazzling."

Bustle

"This is an arresting collection you'll want to read again and again."

Dazed

"When diving into a novel or non-fic feels like a mammoth task in an uncertain world, poetry may be the salve you need – and specifically, it’s Jenny Zhang’s new book of poetry that you definitely want to get at. ... My Baby First Birthday will leave you breathless."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176018110
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/25/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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