TANTO TANTO

CavanKerry Press

"Tanto Tanto is a rich, complex, and breathtaking tapestry of desire, longing, pleasure, sorrow, and, above all, love.  The collection creates a fractal love letter centered on the relationship between the speaker and her wife, but also encompassing the love for their children, the self, poetry, and the body (with the latter as a sight of joy, pleasure, resilience, and spirit). With a voice that is marvelously both tender and vigorous, Carreira moves us to experience love in tuna sandwiches, the divine in the every day, and terror in driving home from the grocery store. Tanto Tanto celebrates the speaker’s love while also masterfully navigating the gifts and cruelties of inheritance growing up in a heteronormative working-class immigrant family, and the fear and violence of life as an immigrant LGBTQ woman in America. Tanto Tanto is gorgeous, sensual, intersectional, intimate and large, honest and real. I was enthralled and moved by this collection."

– Ananda Lima, author of Tropicalia and Mother/Land 

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"In this gorgeous new collection of poems, Marina Carreira breathes life into the bittersweet stories of family and culture, a sensory journey into the striking beauty and hard truths of the immigrant landscape cultivated as an American experience. Her poet soul sings—like a Portuguese saudade—in service to safeguarding what has been lost and what should never be forgotten, “to remember it all—sweat and tears, / Luso ancestry, to run roots through/ my future great-granddaughter’s bones.”

— Rigoberto González, author of over twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, and four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Finishing Line Press

“Key to the fado sound is saudade, a feeling of longing or lament. Marina Carreira’s verses are teeming with such lament. But like the fado singers from her family’s motherland, her poems find both beauty and courage in this saudade. They are unafraid, unashamed, rich with image and wit. Marina’s Fado poems insist on making music of both joy and tears.”

– Vincent Toro, author of “Stereo.Island.Mosaic” and "Tertulia" 

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"Radiant and radical, every poem and work of art within these pages remind me of all the brilliant and bold elements of our world, how every word and photograph capture the wild beauty and sacred darkness of existence. More importantly, I am in awe of how this anthology challenges ideas about what is hallow, godly, and beyond ourselves."

-Marina Carreira , curator