Salgado Maranhão won the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 with Mural of Winds. In 2011, The Color of the Word won the Brazilian Academy of Letters highest poetry award. In 2014, the Brazilian PEN Club chose his recent collection, Mapping the Tribe, as best book of poetry for the year. In 2015 the Brazilian Writers Union gave him first prize, again for The Color of the Word. His newest book is Opera of Nos, launching in September in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to ten books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians. His work has appeared in numerous magazines in the USA, including Bitter Oleander, BOMB, Cream City Review, Dirty Goat, Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Here in the USA, he is represented by two bilingual collections of poetry: Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015).
Alexis Levitin's thirty-nine books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Eugenio de Andrade’s The Art of Patience (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Diálogos Books, 2015), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015). In 2012, Levitin and Maranhao completed a three month reading tour of the USA, visiting over fifty colleges and other institutions. In the spring of 2016 they read again at over twenty universities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and on the West Coast.
Alexis Levitin's thirty-nine books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Eugenio de Andrade’s The Art of Patience (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Diálogos Books, 2015), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015). In 2012, Levitin and Maranhao completed a three month reading tour of the USA, visiting over fifty colleges and other institutions. In the spring of 2016 they read again at over twenty universities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and on the West Coast.
Rage
Howl
Flock
Cleavage
Rage
The line of time erasing my yesterdays has already infested my hide like graffiti on a wall. (A voice in the open tearing me apart over a love that never was.) In short, a ray of pearls will drop from the ravines and sweeten my zither. But now, it’s the ground of the jackals; now, it’s the wind howling in the valleys over the heat of my blood and its memories. And I harbor a backwoods rage that blows through this litany in a sky of flames.
Howl
In your howl there is the anguish of a creature tearing through placenta. And a throbbing emptiness calling for battle: those avid pre-dawn hours above your hardened earth. There, where the flame is torn and a voice paints the days in blood, your flesh is a sea of lava and unrecorded memories. The sunset named you to illumine dahlias, but they sold you to the will of others and to a nettle’s sermon. Blessed be the secret rain that pushes you to milk for words.
Flock
I will not die of torturous lost love, for I am in the breaching of the wind, the unnamable color, the ray piercing the iris. When that unfaithful bitch calls my name, I´ll answer rivers, wind, stone and storm between my teeth. I won´t be the one who waits, crushed in solitude; I´m the one who is many while being nothing. And so, don´t seek me in a broken mirror, in a haunted house, in a wick without flame. Follow me, just us, to the solitary peak, to the flock of those with wings instead of feet.
Cleavage
I sing to be reborn in stone with the seed the sea stole from shipwrecked souls; I sing to share with the breeze the play of endless tracts of words. An atlas opened wide its branches to welcome in my realms: a geometry of rags; a tiger with the sun between its paws. And I follow that river of letters like earth in flames: poetry has stripped me bare to burst asunder with the galaxies.