A collection that explores the beauty of survival in the face of upheaval and loss.
Marina Carreira's Dead Things and Where to Put Them shares the hardships of marriage and motherhood during a pandemic. The exploration of loss within the context of various relationships provides a nuanced look at how grief manifests in everyday life, especially in the face of isolation and uncertainty. Carreira's third collection highlights moments of strength, connection, and hope, and inspires readers to locate their own resilience amidst loss and the unprecedented. With vivid imagery and bittersweet moments, Carreira navigates the space between life and loss.
Table of Contents:
To the Mother Rabbit in My Back Yard
Desgraçada
Penumbra
O Que Não Mata, Engorda
Fazer Figa
The Forest for the Trees
Newark Penn Station
Meditations on a Mid-Life Crisis
Ode to the Deer on the Side of the Road as America
The Music of Animals
Cathexis
Folklore
Ten Ways of Looking at a Mother
Flower Moon
Pandemic
Haibun for My hair
Perfect Circles
It Is A Serious Thing Just To Be Alive
Pai Eats Pie
On Earth Day
Prayer to Saint Philomena
Worm Moon
In The Forest at Midnight
There are Escapes and There are True Things
Death is So Everywhere and So Entire
Ode to the Temporal Lobe
Wolf Moon
A Valley Somewhere
Aubade
Poem for When I Don’t Want to be a Poet
Seagull
Dollar Store Mary
Ain’t That The Way
April 24
A Wild Time
Today, or Daydream about Leaving the House
Your Blue
Vesper
Prayer to Saint Brigid
Matin
Missing Pluto
Dead Things and Where to Put Them
Tonsure
Eulogy for the Dairy Queen on Market
Variation on a Theme by Rachel McKibbens
Litany for the Surviving
Stray
Elegy for Maria Vicente Meireles
Ungrateful Bitch Blues
Dearest,
After Life
Love at the End of the World
New Year’s Day
Sonnet for Saint Audre
Big Steps
Buck Moon
Metempsychosis
Ooms Conservation Area
At The End
Tapestry, or Now I Love Green
Swing
Desgraçada
To The Baby Rabbits in My Backyard
About the Author :
Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Desgracada, Tanto Tanto, Save the Bathwater, and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back.
Review :
"Mourning, liminality, survival."
"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."
"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.’’
