How do we carry our body, capable of producing pleasure and pain, in all our interactions with others as we move through the world? As the poet Morgan Parker writes, “My body is an argument I didn’t start.” The concern for Zhang is how not to allow that argument to reduce one’s body to its mere parts and functions.
Zhang writes on this phenomenon: “my mom was a baby too / and inside her was a teenier baby / if not for that baby / I would still be / essentially an idea.” Born into a body, we are meant to reckon with what society tells us it means. Even as a baby, a female already has all the eggs she will bear for her entire life, her baby form bearing up adulthood the moment she exists on the earth. My Baby First Birthday asks what it is to be born and what we are born with or into (identity, class, race, privilege, an injured planet). One response is a call to action: “be the baby ppl didn’t let u be / for once in yr life / & see what happens.” Here, Zhang is asking us to privilege feeling, the unabashed kind you expressed when you were first ushered into the world.
#First birthdaybook how to
While there are plenty of instances of suffering and trauma in these poems, it is largely an exploration of what it is to be born in a world that is hostile, and how to keep moving through it once you realize that is the case. And, elsewhere: “the problem is the most exotic thing / I could do is suffer / & I already do.” “anything is easy if yr existence is wanted,” Zhang writes. Yet My Baby First Birthday is more focused in its intent: to meditate on what it is to try to exist in a world that tells you time and again you are less than because of your identity - or that your value is only located in your suffering. Both evoke the gestures and textures of Hannah Weiner, Leslie Scalapino, Walt Whitman, and others. Both involve associative imagery, language play, and circle around family. At first glance, Zhang’s latest poetry collection, My Baby First Birthday (Tin House), operates in a similar mode as her first, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus).
The poet, essayist, and fiction writer Jenny Zhang approaches her work with this ethos in mind. In short: To honor feeling is a radical act, and to make art grounded in feeling flouts the very systems that subjugate all manner of people. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. IN HER ESSAY “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde calls upon her reader to privilege feeling over intellect, as the latter is associated with power, control, enslavement, whiteness, and masculinity.
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