My Baby First Birthday, by Jenny Zhang

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. 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 peoples dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how its only in our mothers wombs that were still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because its only then that we dont have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday 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 alonereally alone, like why-was-I-ever-born aloneand trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch somethingskin to skin, animal to animal.

Paperback May 12, 2020