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.