Saudades Tuas/I Miss You by B.D. Esgalhado

An exciting foray into the elusive intricacies of mixed-media, Barbara Duarte Esgalhado’s first book of poetry combines letters, poems, and photographs. It takes great energy from two canonical Portuguese works: Lettres Portugaises, the seventeenth-century French book attributed to the still mysterious “Mariana Alcoforado,” and Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972)—joint authorship by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa and published in English as The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters in 1975. Esgalhado shares her moving life story, in five “confessional” letters, with “Maria,” who, presumably, will hear her “confessions.” The poet tells and retells, firmly and surely, stories of memories that reveal and confront experiences of inner being and outer history. Her encounter with such formidable antecedents results in a complex, uniquely individualized book of poems, an achievement of great merit.

–George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of the English Department and Adjunct Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University.

The intensity, depth, and innovation of Barbara Duarte Esgalhado‘s Saudades Tuas is a marvel, which bears exquisite witness to the profound ways that narratives of family and art weld power, whether through image, absence, longing, or language. Memory happens all at once through Esgalhado’s lens, which is utterly intelligent, intuitive, and perceptive. Writing through choruses of voices about family lineage, labor, nature, about what is both lost and found at the expense of truth, Esgalhado writes, “I know it could cost me my life.” These poems, crafted with precision, beauty, and knowledge, focus on women’s lives, on the feasts and hungers that ache and sustain love and loss, whether culturally or at the complicated joining of our bodies. As readers we are encouraged to look and listen closely. Esgalhado understands the costs of the luminous body she has built and the sacred body of those stories she shares across the ways in which we mark time when she writes, “Daughters, we tell you this: Study/so that survival isn’t your only dream.”

–Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010), The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011), Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011) and Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015).

These richly detailed poems address grief and remembrance with rare insight and grace. The book asks questions about identity, who we are and how we change, and answers with poems that are full of memory and imagination, accompanied by photographs and other visual art, and haunting poetic letters. A smart, beautiful, and moving collection.

–Jennifer Michael Hecht, poet, intellectual historian, and commentator.