At Your Feet

Ana Cristina Cesar, Brenda Hillman

• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781602354852
• eBook ISBN:
  9781602354869
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil's best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. At Your Feet was originally published as a poetic sequence and later became part of a longer hybrid work— sometimes prose, sometimes verse—documenting the life and mind of a forcefully active literary woman. Cesar, who also worked internationally as a journalist and translator, often found inspiration in the writings of other poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Armando Freitas Filho, and Gertrude Stein. Her innovative writing has been featured in Sun and Moon's classic anthology Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2000). Poet Brenda Hillman and her mother Helen Hillman (a native speaker of Portuguese) worked with Brazilian poet Sebastião Edson Macedo and translator/editor Katrina Dodson to render as faithfully as possible the intricately layered poems of this legendary writer. At Your Feet includes both the English translation and original Portuguese.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Soundtrack in the background: piano in the brothel, voices haggling
• A storm closes in.
• Second quick story about happiness—going down the hill at twilight—my love was far away, with that air of never doubting, and was saying: my parents... —I can’t doubt my little steps anymore, in this country place—now you speak even more softly, so gently
• Lock and Key
• European Winter
• Carioca Night
• Ivory
• Independent Youth
• EXTERIOR. DAY. Exchanging my absolute indiscretion for your outdated story. My ecstasy for your situation. SEA, BLUE, CAVERNS, FIELDS AND THUNDER. I lean against the wall of the tram and cry. I catch a cab that goes through several city tunnels. I flirt w
• Primer for a Cure
• I need to go back and take another look at those two empty rooms.
• Ladies’ Talk
• Summary
• The story is complete: wide sargasso sea, blue blue that doesn’t
• Without you I’m really a lake, a mountain.
• Behind the Eyes of Serious Girls
• Behind the Eyes of Serious Girls
• Haunting Encounter at the Cathedral
• This Book
• Two Old Ones
• Vacillation of Vocation
• My mouth is
• setting you free:
• she loved
• it’s very clear
• When between us there was only
• Used to reappear suddenly
• Bedside
• Adventure in the Stocky House
• Public Man #1 (Anthology)
• Pour Mémoire
• Good Friday
• What Slides
• Samba Song
• Travelling
• Out There
• Now and then I dig through this black bag hunting for a passport photo.
• I wanted to speak of death
• Holy Saturday
• Ever since I came back I jump
• Everything I never told you, inside these margins.
• Final Fire
• Onomastic Index
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Free Verse Editions
• About the Editors and Translators
• Back cover