FIRST EPISTLE TO THE AMPHIBIANS

In the first selected volume of Ricardo Domeneck’s work to appear in English, the acclaimed Brazilian poet constructs a hyperbolic spiral of artifice, rage, and tenderness. A consummately international poet, Domeneck centers the body “in all its moisture and all its fluids,” while never settling on a master style. Writing with tenderness and anger about earthly experience, friendship, love, and nature, and reacting against the previous generation’s anti-lyrical, impersonal poesia de invenção, Domeneck introduced a dense corporeal lyricism salted with camp at its high and low limits into contemporary Brazilian experimental poetry. Chris Daniels’s translation draws from more than two decades of the poet’s work.

If you have never cried in the gutter in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, clutching a volume of Mr. Domeneck’s break-up poems, you haven’t lived. —Victor Heringer

Ricardo Domeneck's extraordinary selected poems attends to the familiar (and funny!) surface of daily life—French cigarettes and a lover's eyelashes and dingy apartments and absent fathers—while plunging into the unknown, into silence, into despair, where language doesn’t so much fail as it rediscovers itself. That's beauty. Domeneck’s poetry speaks ‘loudly and precisely,’ without equivalence. I’m always listening. —Andrew Durbin

Domeneck’s sensual erudition documents both how “lucidity lights the way / to the imaginary” and how “the flesh remembers, / and the flesh reminds.” This savvily edited selected situates his Brazilian Portuguese in a transnational, translingual network of gay predecessor poets that includes Cavafy, Pasolini, and O’Hara. Business casual and Baroque, sincere and Camp, in persona and in flagrante delicto, his wit’s always ready: “When the barbarians arrive, / they’ll find me in bed.” —Brian Teare

This superb selection of twenty years of Domeneck's work sings ‘the body's morse code’ in all its guts, gusto, and glory. … Breath nourishes and holds the communion of human, divine, and world, even as they wrestle in Domeneck’s words and Chris Daniels’s tender, triumphant translation. —Hilary Kaplan

In Chris Daniels's nimble translation, we can hear Domeneck’s unique blend of tones—the wit of Catullus, the melancholy of Cavafy, the ferocity of Plath. This is poetry of the body and its secretions, of blood and sacrifice, of nature in its indifference to any individual life, but it is also, improbably, daylit and everyday, teeming with references to music and writing, the texture of cities and the beauty of young lovers. —Chris Nealon

What a joy to see this long-overdue translation of Ricardo Domeneck’s poetry into English! In this selection spanning two decades, Domeneck plays the poète maudit and channels the self-dramatizing diva, from Medea to Kate Bush. At their most fun-loving, these poems propel us along in a Frank O’Hara-like whiz! bang! momentum. Chris Daniels’s translation is tremendous. —Katrina Dodson