Blood of the Sun

Blood of the Sun
Blood of the Sun (back cover)
Poetry

Blood of the Sun

“A complex and offbeat poet whose work merits a wide audience.” —COLETTE INEZ
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In Blood of the Sun, Salgado Maranhão—one of the most celebrated poets in Brazil today—weds the powerfully socio-political to the metaphysical.

Masterfully translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, this collection plunges into the concrete and the conceptual. Butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. Cannibalism offers an opportunity to reflect on random killings and the plight of modern man. The resulting poems are varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered. Maranhão’s language sings in forms fixed and free, filled with a jazzlike musicality and fluted rhymes. “In paining me my pain makes me a dean,” one poem reads. “Whose vice is claiming virtue as his own. / Am I saint or devil, or in between? / Am I a killer who is yet unknown?”

Sensually provocative, defined by an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern, Blood of the Sun introduces a thrilling new voice to the English language.

ISBN:
9781571314536
Publish Date: 
09/11/2012
Pages: 
166
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.44 in
Weight: 
8.2 oz
Translator
Alexis Levitin

Alexis Levitin has translated over thirty collections of Portugese poetry and prose into English, including Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord and Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun. He is a Distinguished Professor at SUNY Plattsburgh.

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