From Here to the Ocean by Lucie Pereira

Like octopus legs, the poems in From Here to the Ocean offer concurrent possibilities. Lucie Pereira‘s speaker lives everywhere and nowhere for such is the nature of mixed-race subject positionality. Pereira embraces both contradiction and confrontation by imagining what might happen when “white ancestors meet their brown daughter” in “sticky mango sunlight.” The language of flora and fauna across land and sea lends a classic elegance to these complex narratives with their eucalyptus trees and snowy plovers. From Here to the Ocean reminds us that the global is the local, and there are always wonders for us in this world that lie just beneath the surface.

–Rita Mookerjee, author of False Offering

From Here to the Ocean is a book of light and tenderness, of memory as remnants and souvenirs. It was a delight to read the way Lucie Pereira writes San Francisco, as a place of love and diaspora and wonder— a place where the holy is still discoverable. In the poem, Leftovers, she writes “…so I find other ways to leave echoes,/ to graffiti myself onto your memory:/ I was here, I was here, I was here” and this how the book remains with you, as a nimble and ethereal presence, one that is intimate and enduring.

–Jason Bayani, author of Locus

Lucie Pereira’s debut chapbook is a morsel to be devoured whole, savored in every crevice of the mouth, and digested in the long months after it burrows into you. To say that I’ve been waiting for these poems in print is an understatement—hearing the phrase “quicksilver seconds slip over each other” & the declaration “if hell tastes like fruit-flavored liquor / on someone else’s tongue, / then I have no use for heaven” is only a sliver of the poems they descend from. With humor, wit, tenacity, and the soft caress of a well-thought volta, Pereira’s poems are a contemporary reckoning of new thought, connecting the lucky reader with a stream of thought I want to bathe in forever.

–Giovanna Lomanto, author of driver’s seat echo