Review: fox woman get out! by India Lena González
Reviewed by Laura Yeck
BOA Editions. 2023. 96 pages.
India Lena González’s debut collection, fox woman get out!, is a striking and intimate portraiture of personal identity formed from visceral and lingering narratives of family history and ancestry. The work reads as an excavation of lineage rooted in landscapes and cultures spanning oceans of geography and time. These poems collapse temporal boundaries, creating a liminal canvas for vividly crafted ancestral reunions. In the process, they interrogate how identity is tethered to the past and carried into the future.
González’s verse showcases how a dynamic lived reality is ignited by fragments of familial legacy and further illustrates how these two aspects become compressed into individual memory. In “MAMI: a chest for healing” she buttresses story, memory, and the boundary beyond temporality, which for González is a spirit world that is, at times, tantalizingly close, as in the fourth stanza: “remember how her daddy held you up to the light bulb / how he said you were born with a veil over your eyes / he saw you staring straight into the spirit world.” González again teases an intricate and ethereal border between life, death, and lineage in “SANTIAGO SEIJAS FERNÁNDEZ PEREZ . . .ALCANTARA” with the opening of the final stanza, “i am fastened to papi now. born again as a woman so i must take care of him.” Her merging of family relations through time becomes brilliantly buoyant in “for my future babies,” a lyric that coalesces several of her earlier motifs:
to my daughter
you are cool light
before the sun dies
(o how i revere you)
how you take your earthen feet
crawl your way up my bare legs
to my stomach to my chest
A gentle calm, quite distinct from the rest of the work, carries this piece, and the concluding stanza again complicates any tendency the reader may have to view time and temporal experience as merely linear—“that I was born pregnant / with the very vision of /you.” This ever-present insistence on simultaneity is one of the most compelling features of fox woman, and I was truly absorbed by these tender moments of restraint.
Another recurring feature that animates the work is the presence of her “twin,” a character who is an actual biological twin-sister, yet she also has a mythic, gestural quality to her. So recurrent is this figure that at times she seems to have merged with the speaker, resulting in a mischievous kind of folie à deux. This doubling of the consciousness of the speaker with “twin” also makes space for moments of startling distinction, when the speaker is forced into differentiation from “twin.” This shared madness is especially heightened in the conspiratorial twinned voicings of “we.are.old.everything.is.old.,” which unfolds in three distinct scenes enlivened by notes of comical convergence. In scene one, “next we settle into our haunches & take turns tapping each other on the third eye / until it turns into quite a whacking.” And though united in mind, these twinned bodies morph into distinct elemental renderings during scene three: “& i remember, we are gods, you are the spiral arms of the milky way galaxy & i am red clay. all the same in the end, you mutter.”
While the poet’s attention is fixed on family, González does create deft moments of spiraling outside this lens and invites the reader to engage with the book’s broader contextual and cultural influences. As announced in the work’s title, González defamiliarizes the alluring vixen trope and introduces the dynamic “fox woman,” a label that challenges the reader to explore how naming can both signify and undermine gender expectations. The typically male fox is merged with woman, creating a hybrid that reevaluates the territories of masculine and feminine expression. At first, the “fox woman” expresses desperation at being trapped in a body that is continually hunted, preyed upon, and forced to defend itself. In “fox woman saunters back,” we encounter a disarmingly overly apologetic fox: “i did not mean to scream / the way a woman does in distress / i did not mean to ravage your inner flesh.” Over the course of the work, the “Fox Woman” becomes crystalized into the emphatically unapologetic and reckoning force finally found in “fox woman strikes back,” where:
the men have gone hunting
they have aimed their weapons all lined up
i have beguiled them
leaping in front of their man-made temper
chasing my own tail ( turned it into flame to offer them fire the fools )
As the image extends and the line closes, I cannot unsee the Firefox internet browser icon winking up at me from the taskbar of my computer. Unintended visual associations aside, González does not limit her keen voice to concerns of male and female violence. Towards the end of the poem, she questions form itself as well as the ability of love to endure beyond temporal borders: “how shall that love deliver us past the precipice of death? / how do you take it with you if you only worship the form?” Questions of form seem largely open-ended for the poet who allows her words to advance along the page in a multitude of experimental modes that keep the eye and mind moving.
While reading this collection, I was particularly captivated by how these poems function as units of teleportation; as you move from one work to the next, there is a sense of immediate transport to a new environment. Sometimes it is a strictly physical landscape, and other times it is an undefined spot in the mind’s eye. You find yourself trusting the speaker as you continue to leap across the pages with them. Be it backstage or onstage, in the women’s communal tub at Ten Thousand Waves Spa, an apartment in Barcelona, or a fox’s verdant dreamscape, there is no standing still for long.
Paradoxically, at times, one may feel a bit of claustrophobia in some of the denser works like “the heart beats so large i cannot sleep.” Here the speaker is so deeply caught up in the personal narrative of an unknowable family history that inevitably, the reader must stand apart and continue from a distance. And yet, I am curious to see what is next for González’s dexterous poetic craft, and will the “fox woman” indeed get out from behind the ensnaring familial frame she has so artfully constructed? Ultimately, fox woman get out! whirls with an emotive pulse that rewards the reader as they share in González’s irrepressible passion.
Laura Yeck is a PhD candidate in English literature and Teaching Fellow for the University of North Texas. She enjoys exploring symbolic and archetypal connections between literature, art, and pop culture focusing primarily on Shakespeare and other early modern works. She received her bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University – Idaho and her master’s from Tarleton State University. She has been teaching English at the undergraduate level since 2013.