“Hot and Alive”: Jenny Zhang’s My Baby First Birthday

by Ellie Zupancic
Illustration by Vivian Le

Jenny Zhang’s second collection of poetry–following her first, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (2012), and short story collection, Sour Heart (2017)–My Baby First Birthday comes in like a radiant bloom: a book in flower, both tender and demanding.

Illustration by Vivian Le

My Baby First Birthday dilates around our 365-day-year and grows human, and contracts around a language that feels distinctly young, growing truer and truer. In early 2019, the internet saw “I’m baby” rhetoric flourish across social media, infiltrating internet subcultures from dove-emoji-Twitter, to gay-Twitter, to stan-Twitter. The thing about the “I’m baby” meme is that you either inherently ‘get’ it or you don’t–but the reason it resonates so heavily with Gen-Z’s and Millennials probably has something to do with the way it strikes a fatalistic chord, one we’re so inundated with that we’ve morphed our comedic sensibilities to make way for it. As Gabrielle Paiella wrote in The Cut, “When everything in the world seems deeply doomed, it’s comforting to just curl up and be, well, baby.”

Zhang’s newest collection reverberates around these cultural configurations in its pursuit of questioning: she writes, “WHY / WHY / WHY / WHY ME?” and “but i’m not an easy woman / and why would you want to be?” and “what if there was something softer?” We are cornered, faced with seeing ourselves born, figuring out what it even means to be born, to be born into a world so unloving. Zhang’s questioning isn’t universal, though, because we’re not all born into the same world. 

She nods to the stratified nature of the world we come into “without / consent,” and she’s un-shy in poking at the resulting dynamics. To white people like me, she asks, “is it only catastrophe that gets you going?” and we’re suddenly faced with a mirror that turns back an image of trauma eroticized. What’s your trauma? becomes What trauma have you decided to hold onto, to put on display? On white privilege, she asks, “is your charisma a marriage / between being born lucky and finding a way / to still be damaged?” Zhang’s challenging her readers illuminates deficits they have yet to reckon with–all while retaining the candid, sexy tone she winds throughout the collection.

It’s that tone that seems to offer the reader an unusual permission to sit in their body, to remember the corporeal history that came before (“my mom was a baby too / and inside her was a teenier baby”)–almost like a spiritual trick to get us back in our mother’s wombs. These moments are uncomfortable, and yet Zhang executes them with her typical ease, language that’s effortlessly cool: “every day I feel like telling my mom / how much / her lil cunt means to me.” In this, there’s both the child that turns away and the adult that can’t help but turn back. It’s something I’ve thought about frequently as a young woman. Why do we despise our mothers as girls? Maybe it has something to do with the way we fear aging, or maturing, or going through puberty, the way we see these things in our mothers. The way we have to eventually become them. “it’s all worth it / to beam like catullus beamed / he knew my mom as well / as me / I love her / I love her / I love her.” Can I go back? 

“The only time I ever mattered / was on my baby first birthday.” Can I go back? Zhang asks. 

The sharpest moments in Zhang’s poetry, to me, are those when she’s most frank. She’s confident in posing violence against women in sexy terms because that’s how they’re framed in real life, by men who are constantly at the wheel, calling the shots. She writes, “my detachable pussy is not afraid of being / approached by a man late at night / who is like hey girl / you don’t need none of that / you look good without makeup / and I feel very sexy / because my cunt gets leashed to a tree / and waves hello to everyone / like hi like hi like hi hi hi.” The inherent power move in moments like this is Zhang’s candor in invoking the very language of the oppressor. 

Zhang’s poems move quickly between a sexual intimacy and a motherly intimacy (from “I feel very sexy / because my cunt gets leashed to a tree” to “sweet baby / be the baby ppl didn’t let u be / for once in yr life”), both paradigms tinged by different violences. These turns are swift and surprising, yet so regular we come to expect them. Just when logic gets slippery, we’re handed colloquialisms to steady us, to keep the poems from tumbling beyond our grasp. At times, syntax and diction disjoin and force the reader into a hunt for meaning; Zhang writes “don’t you ever / take your mouth off my page.” In this instance, the language requires that certain syntactical moves and traditions are in our repertoire as readers and communicators–we’re used to demands that start don’t you ever... and we could perhaps even see the image of a mouth on a page–but in conjunction, the demand is somewhat absurdist. Is it anger? Is it seduction?

On Instagram, Zhang posted a screenshot from a Lit Hub Author Questionnaire where she was asked, “What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?” She replies:

“I never properly learned grammar. I still don’t know where commas go. Do I want to be better at it? Only insomuch as I want to stop hearing from annoying people ... Ideally, I will always be curious and open to learning. I like writing that’s hot and alive. Is that a craft element? I don’t enjoy reading things that are cold and lifeless. I think I’m a hot writer. I think my writing is alive.”

“Just when logic gets slippery, we’re handed colloquialisms to steady us, to keep the poems from tumbling beyond our grasp. At times, syntax and diction disjoin and force the reader into a hunt for meaning”

Zhang pulls off the turns masterfully at both the local and global level, her careful attention to enjambment only amplifying the meaning we’re to search for. She writes, “I liked the story of the monkey / who was inside / that woman and when she met / that man / who fucked her without asking”–and, in breaking the line, offers a delayed resolution–“about pain or pleasure or desire or terror,” perhaps resolving nothing at all.

My Baby First Birthday is cribbed from motherhood, from babyhood, and from diminishing first-evers. Still, we can soften even as we harden. It is possible, Zhang writes in an Instagram caption, for us to “feel innocent, even after so much pain and suffering. There are still more baby first birthdays to be had.”