3.0
My Baby First Birthday
ByPublisher Description
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020
A Best Read of 2020 at Ms. Magazine
"To read Jenny Zhang is to embrace primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing and rage." —TIME
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 people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t 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 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.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesMy Baby First Birthday Reviews
3.0
Lucy Hayes
Created 12 months agoShare
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“I think I would have liked this more if I didn’t read it via audiobook….”
kimberlyg
Created about 1 year agoShare
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Lizramona
Created over 1 year agoShare
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“This was a very weird read but it made so much sense to me.
I liked that Jenny talks about existential dread as something she is slowly coming to terms with. She recognizes that she has to live (for whatever sake) despite all the disgustingness of depression and capitalism. I enjoyed how unapologetic she is about her dissatisfaction but still manages to communicate her hope for a better life because she deserves it- we all deserve it!
Bonus: this collection contains the only poem with themes of climate change that I’ve ever enjoyed.
Also, as I was reading this, all I could think about was Mitski and how a lot of the poems sound much like her music- come to find out she rated it😜.”Sadie
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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librarysoflyss
Created about 2 years agoShare
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