First Epistle to the Amphibians

Ricardo Domeneck (trans. Chris Daniels)

A consummately international poet, acclaimed poet Ricardo Domeneck centers the body “in all its moisture and all its fluids,” while never settling on a master style. Writing with tenderness and anger about earthly experience, friendship, love, and nature, and reacting against the previous generation’s anti-lyrical, impersonal poesia de invenção, Domeneck introduced a dense corporeal lyricism salted with camp at its high and low limits into contemporary Brazilian experimental poetry. First Epistle to the Amphibians, the first English-language selection of Domeneck’s poetry, draws from more than two decades of his published work.

Ricardo Domeneck's extraordinary selected poems attends to the familiar (and funny!) surface of daily life—French cigarettes and a lover's eyelashes and dingy apartments and absent fathers—while plunging into the unknown, into silence, into despair, where language doesn’t so much fail as it rediscovers itself. That's beauty. Domeneck’s poetry speaks ‘loudly and precisely,’ without equivalence. I’m always listening. — Andrew Durbin