Wet Land
“Lucas de Lima’s stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it—before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It’s an activity of evisceration.”—Bhanu Kapil
Tropical Sacrifice
“Staggering in scale and scope, Tropical Sacrifice reimagines episodes from the ‘mottled bloodbath’ performed in the ongoing narrative of the colonizing and the colonized; the ‘race mixture and rape’ that determined human and nonhuman life worlds on the recently nominated American hemisphere. A synthesis of material form and content, and along concrete typographic expanses, poetic sequences alternate with a gallery of color photographs. Lucas de Lima summons the Amazon set ablaze, epistemic devastation, ancestor memory, spiritual cosmologies, and political struggles. The coalescing histories include the case of alleged serial murderer Febrônio Índio do Brasil, the unsettling depravity of the recent Brazilian state, environmental mayhem, species relation, and violent sexual fantasies deputizing rage and sorrow in the wake of one’s lost erotic object. Along the way, poet and former lover mutually metamorphose into ‘disfiguring protrusions’—a display of poetic sorcery that honors the departed even as it dreams the birthplace of amazement.“—Roberto Tejada
Cosmic Bottom
A work-in-progress, Cosmic Bottom reclaims bottoming as the birthing of underworlds. As the poet confronts shame and desire around the anus—the most hidden and taboo of orifices—the body offers a gateway to ecologies real and imagined. From inside and outside of imperialist, capitalist violence, the hole of liberation reaches beyond the self and grows outwards.