By Millicent Borges Accardi
Raised in Los Banos, California, Portuguese-American writer Sam Pereira has published six books, most recently,
True North and Untrue You (Nine Mile 2020), a poetry collection which David St John (author of
The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems) states is “uniquely American. . . as if Lenny Bruce had written songs with Tom Waits.” Diniz Borges, director of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno adds that Pereira’s latest book “engages, surprises and liberates.”
Besides the six collections of poetry, Pereira’s work has also appeared in several anthologies of contemporary American poetry, among them:
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.