By Millicent Borges Accardi
At any time, especially in the Portuguese community, there is a cause for celebration when the writer Frank X Gaspar publishes a new book, but, perhaps, even more so in the era of the Covid pandemic and social unrest. What better time to delve into a novel that takes place through the eyes of a young Frankie G sorting his way along the streets of Provincetown, Massachusetts and NYC, at the crest of the Vietnam war, and a selection of poetry, seen through the eyes of a mysterious literary muse called Renata as she traipsed through Portugal, in love and passion, amid the Carnation Revolution?
Book: ‘The Poems of Renata Ferreira’ by Frank X. Gaspar – Editor’s Note
Posted on 11 January 2020.
Renata Ferreira’s poems were composed in the final years of Portugal’s fascist regime, exposing and subverting the government’s draconian edicts against women’s rights, sexual freedoms, political dissent, and progressive thought. While she worked in the resistance as a clandestine writer, passing hand-typed bulletins and banned literature throughout Lisbon, her poetry is unmistakably ardent, tender, fraught, erotic, and Sapphic. Presenting the poems of this Portuguese American writer and detailing their surprising rediscovery in 2015, Frank X. Gaspar fuses genres, flouts borders, and brings to life a voice that had been silenced by history and happenstance. As his inventive narrative unfolds, Ferreira emerges, whole and mysterious, offering up her history, her passions, and her art.