Writing an angsty little poem is a time-honored tradition for girls everywhere, from penning in one’s most secret journal to the notes app. Sometimes, those words end up printed and published for the world to see: such is the case for Megan Fox, who on Tuesday announced her new poetry collection Pretty Boys Are Poisonous.
Publisher Simon & Schuster describes the book as the “powerful debut from one of the most well-known women of our time.” The description reads, “Turn the page, bite the apple, and sink your teeth into the most deliciously compelling and addictive books you’ll read all year.”
“These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence,” Fox says in her own statement on the collection. “I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins. My freedom lives in these pages and I hope that my words can inspire others to take back their happiness and their idenтιтy by using their voice to illuminate what’s been buried, but not forgotten, in the darkness.”
Fox has shared some of her writing online before. Back in February 2021, she posted a tribute to her fiancé Machine Gun Kelly (real name Colson Baker) on Instagram for Valentine’s Day:
“here goes my heart
manifest outside of my body
draped in the towering silhouette of a most unusually handsome boy
magical and haunted
kinetic and tortured
ethereal and dangerous
cosmic
lawless
eternal
creative geniu
the journey will likely be perilous
but there is no destination without him”
As a тιтle, Pretty Boys Are Poisonous feels in line with some of that flowery Instagram caption work (“Achingly beautiful boy… My heart is yours,” is another example, also about MGK). Your mileage may vary regarding the sentiments or the style, but Fox almost certainly has interesting things to say when it comes to keeping silence on behalf of men. Speaking with Glamour in 2022, the actor said she’d had “genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry” but didn’t feel “included in the feminist community,” possibly because she wasn’t “a very sympathetic victim.”
“I think that I was ahead of the #MeToo movement by almost a decade,” she said at the time. “I was always speaking out against some of the abusive, misogynistic, patriarchal things that were going on in Hollywood back in 2008 and 2009, way before people were ready to embrace that or tolerate it. And I actually got ridiculed for doing it. I think people just have had time to review that, in retrospect.”
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Pretty Boys Are Poisonous may then be an interesting combination of relatably cringe love poems and literary insight into Hollywood misogyny from Fox’s unique perspective. Whatever it is will be revealed when the book hits shelves on November 7.
