Dead Things and Where to Put Them

"Marina Carreira's Dead Things and Where to Put Them takes up Mary Oliver's mantel with its exquisite poems about baby rabbits' "buttoned eyes and tiny ears, bodies / sleek with new fur and soil," a "white, worm moon / wriggling her big belly across the backyard grass," "The glimmering eye of a doe greeting the morning with a yawn." Carreira goes a step further by placing her nature poems in the context of pandemic, patriarchy, whiteness, a working-class girlhood in Newark. In "Litany for Surviving," the speaker reflects on "[w]hat a privilege it is / to own this imagination. This safe, white skin. How dare I think of summer, / streams and fauna when so many have yet to know freedom of such things?" These poems wooshed through my body in a rush of beauty, vulnerability, lyricism. This is not just a poetry book—it's a guide for how to love in this broken world."


 

-- Claudia Cortese, author of Wasp Queen

"Marina Carreira’s poems close in on the last wild things--the rabbits and squirrels, the children and poets--all the life that scrambles for a living in and around the houses and freeways of her city. Writing through the pandemic and political decay, through childhood and parenthood, she crosses the Atlantic line by line, weaving Portuguese into English, living inside the uneasy inheritance of ancestral sayings, wisdom and warning, blessing and curse. It's the open heart and tender rage of these poems that I love the most--their will to survive, to produce new and better words to pass down the generations. May they last, “o fim do mundo.’’
 

-- Casey Walker, author of Last Days in Shan