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!
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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.
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Part ecstatic elegy, part spell, this is a betwixt poetics, a kaleidoscopic, disruptive, and meditative work.
A finalist for Poetry Society of America's 2024 Norma Farber First Book Award, listed as "the best poetry of the last year" by Ms. Magazine, and spotlighted in three Book Riot reading lists...
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Reviews:
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"This shapeshifting debut collection by poet, editor, dancer, and actor González exhibits the audacity, care, flair, and daring of its author’s respective selves. Compared to Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka, González channels her Native and African American heritages into an excoriated speaker, the audacious fox woman, who outwits her pursuers—'the men have gone hunting / they have mistaken me for prey for wife.' … A breathtaking book by an artist to watch."
— Diego Báez, starred Booklist review
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“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
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“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
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“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
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"González astonishes with verve and variety in a book that begins with a prayer to the morning and ends in a space beyond language. She explodes the self into refracting fractals, performers who have their say. When the self is not one fixed thing, must we believe in its beginning or end?"
— Emily Pérez, RHINO Poetry review
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"India Lena González’s fox woman get out! is medicine poetry."
— Jami Macarty, New Pages Blog review
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"fox woman get out! whirls with an emotive pulse that rewards the reader as they share in González’s irrepressible passion."
— Laura Yeck, American Literary Review