Issue 6

Reaping Raptures – Lusa Prose & Poetry

Introduction by Katherine Vaz

These pieces—collected by writer Oona Patrick and published by editor Elizabeth Hodges—will shock the reader. The authors are all from Portugal or Brazil, ready to speak to a North American audience hungry for voices originating in other languages, especially when the work is fearless about the global perceptions of women.

These inventive, nervy, fiercely blunt writers recognize that disturbing times call for a literature that personalizes disturbance even while railing against it. They reject the confinement of traditional narratives. You won’t find bucolic niceties or sentimental aspirations here. No romantic escapism. Absent are tales about an agonizing search for a beloved. The socially-imposed prettification of motherhood itself is rejected. A screaming child might turn into “…a machine that generated pure evil,” and birth is anchored in blood. As the iconic writer Maria Teresa Horta states, art must come now “…without heroes or tears.”

Read More