Caetano by Alexis Almeida

"Caetano speaks of a self that has been torn in two and that—musically, wisely, tenderly—no longer yearns for unity." —Lucy Ives

Imagined as a series of experiments in autobiography, Caetano invokes the name of the author’s grandfather to write toward the mystery of family, originals, and their ruptures, breaks, and re-imaginings. Written from distinct positions in time, the poems in this collection think about the (im)possibility of faithful reproduction, the space between an original and its translation, and the moving target of a portrait as it moves through different narrative forms.

Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Things I Have Made a Fiction (Winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize). She is also recently the translator of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems (The Song Cave), and her translation of Laura Fernández’s There’s a Monster in the Lake will be out with Graywolf next year. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant and residencies from Yaddo and The Emily Harvey Foundation. She lives in New York and edits 18 Owls Press.

PRAISE

"The sentence invites reversal, a one hundred and eighty degree rotation. I feel that the lyric is asking me to reason it out—keep the grammar intact, and (re)write this into its opposite. A whole new text clinging to the underbelly of what is immediately there. Almeida brings these poems into plurality." —Alison Graham

"In Caetano, Alexis Almeida brilliantly conjures forms for exploring the porous liminality between thought and feeling, dream and reality, within and without. Almeida builds a poetic ontology lush with the intricacies of lived experience, desire, motherhood, and daily care. I love living in the warm realms of this book." —Alli Warren

"The poems in Caetano hit with the stoned clarity of a psilocybin trip’s long downslope, post-bliss and preternatural. I’m talking about the minor psychedelia of a great sentence’s unfolding, the way it swings the sense around. And what’s sense’s content? Apprehensions of life and death. Which Almeida finds everywhere in these quotidian auto portraits where total syntactic calm makes meaning crackle and convulse." —Ben Krusling

"This is the sweetest book I've read in a long time. Full of translucent, precious substances found in the everyday, Caetano speaks of a self that has been torn in two and that—musically, wisely, tenderly—no longer yearns for unity." —Lucy Ives