India Lena González boldly and confidently asserts her voice in Fox Woman Get Out!, a profound debut infused with unique manipulations of page and text. The collection concerns itself with the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, lived experience and family mythos, the self and its complexity. Turn after turn, González returns to her twin, the ways in which their experiences ebb and flow together. Fox Woman Get Out! is a deeply nuanced mediation on how we occupy the world, how we occupy ourselves.

Aracelis Girmay, writing in the forward to the collection, describes the book as a “text/revelation/performance/sounding,” a description which encapsulates González’s approach to the page. The lines move back and forth across white space at will; the text shifts from unassuming lowercase to energetic capitalizations, reverberating like the voice of a live reading might. These textual manipulations reinforce González’s insistence on visibility and empower the speakers in her poems to reclaim physical space as they work to reclaim lineage and ancestry. As a collection, Fox Woman Get Out! is a powerful assertion that defies simple categorization.

González opens the collection with “we n’ de ya ho,” a poem that makes deft use of white space and movement as the speaker connects to family. The first lines of the poem reduce the body to “sour meat distressed birthmark,” a turn which emphasizes the speaker’s desire for a more spiritual and ethereal connection to “big mother.” The speaker laments that speaking “big mother” does not bridge the divide, “fry bread does not fall.” Even as the speaker goes “to pine ridge rez” those around her “do not/applaud.” These lines help to set up the overriding theme of lineage that carries throughout the collection, as well as the frustration González’s speakers often embody as they strive to reconcile desire with the corporeal.

“una parda, which is me,” the second poem in the collection, helps to contextualize this frustration somewhat as the speaker aligns herself with the term “parda,” which an inscription to the poem defines as referring to “mixed bloods whose ancestry could almost never be accurately described.” The opening lines evoke the title of the collection,

i am a perpetual pardon

i limp into the room &

you say: fox woman get out!

smudge it & start again

These lines ground the speaker as the “fox woman” that appears across the collection, as well as how “you” continue to restrict her ability to occupy certain spaces. Aligning the gatekeeper inside the poem with the second person pronoun implicates the reader, insisting that we reconcile our complicity with the restrictive actions inside the poem, as well as the practices which continue to oppress Indigenous peoples in America. Stanzas later, the speaker proclaims, “i get seasick now that i’m older/the colonial in me is wearing away.” This reflection moves the poem from a space of pure lament to one of radical reclamation. The speaker acknowledges her inability to fully recover both her bodily history as multi-racial and her ancestral history as a descendant of multiple erased cultures.

The speaker refers to her twin often and, though she never receives a name, frequently describes the twin as integral to her acceptance of self. In “we.are.old.everything.is.old.,” the pregnant speaker wakes her twin after her “clear white milk hits the herringbone floor.” The speaker is anything but subtle, shouting for her twin to “WAKE THE HELL UP” before admitting, “I AM NO LONGER AS PRECIOUS AS I REMEMBER MYSELF BEING.” The twin heeds her pleas as the two of them “call each other precious for the rest of the night.” This intimate moment between the speaker and her twin exemplifies the role of the twin, who is never far from the speaker and continually helps to ground her in the present.

Fox Woman Get Out! is a remarkable debut, one that exudes awareness and confidence far beyond what we might expect from a relatively new voice. India Lena González refuses to temper her style, and the result is a collection at once comfortable in its flaws and immensely proud of what it accomplishes.