Saudade

"[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own."—The Rumpus "With a stunning mastery of metaphor, linguistic precision, and a soulful determined vision, Brimhall's work reveals an artist tuned to the significance of everyday experience."—Dorianne Laux "Saudade" is a Portuguese word referring to a quality of longing that has no direct translation into English. Inspired by stories from her Brazilian-born mother, Traci Brimhall's third collection—a lush and startling "autobiomythography"—is reminiscent of the rich imaginative worlds of Latin American magical realists. Set in the Brazilian Amazon, Saudade is one part ghost story, one part revival, and is populated by a colorful cast of characters and a recurring chorus of irreverent Marias. From "Incomplete Address to the Lord": When I found that mass of scales and muscle, saw one anaconda twist around another, watched a split tongue flick the air, choosing me, black as the devil's own and twice as thick, males coiled around the female tickling her back with their spurs, I knew I'd give anything to be her. I felt the pulse in my eyelid, tasted the ants that paraded over my plantains at night, drank all the darkness out of my wife's breast. Lord, I'd rather be crazy than broken . . . Traci Brimhall is the author of two previous poetry collections. She earned her PhD from Western Michigan University and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. She lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

Have you ever felt at a loss for words? Like there wasnt a word invented for the situation or emotion you were experiencing? That was exactly how I felt. After you were gone there was nothing I could say to express the way I felt. Empty? Broken? Hollow? None of those words began to describe what was going on inside my heart. People say all wounds heal with time.That was not my experience, as time passed the longing for you became more intense. I was sure something was wrong with me. How could I love you when you were not even there? When I wasnt even sure of your existence? I stumbled on a word that I never heard of before. It was a silly article that popped up while I was doing research online. Saudade: The Untranslatable Word Everyone Sings About. I was intrigued by this and as a teacher of a language wanted to know more. It turned out it is a Portuguese word that is defined as a melancholy nostalgia. There are many different definitions for this word there was one that I thought was most appropriate. The love that remains.

Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil. López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public. Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.

Bones Worth Breaking is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers and a reckoning with the global forces that shaped them. Nobody around David Martinez saw how quickly he was breaking apart except for his younger brother, Mike. They stood out in Idaho: mixed-race in a Mormon community that, in the years before David’s birth, considered Black people ineligible for salvation. The Martinez brothers were raised to be “good boys,” definitely not to get high, skateboard all night, or get arrested, all of which they did with zeal. Then their paths diverged. David went on a two-year mission trip to Brazil like his father before him, and Mike stayed in the States, finding himself in and out of prison. When David returned, in the middle of the still-unnamed opioid epidemic, things had irrevocably changed, and in 2021, Mike unexpectedly died in prison. Martinez writes with a serrated edge, as viscerally felt as an exposed nerve, and transforms from a stoic boy constantly seeking escape to a vulnerable man eager to contextualize the legacies and losses that have shaped his life. With a wild, ragged velocity—flipping and soaring like a pro skater—Martinez defies a linear telling of his life and tackles topics from abuse and racism to writing and capturing the meaning of the specific nostalgia of saudade. Bones Worth Breaking is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers who were robbed of the chance to grow old together, and a reckoning with the brutal global forces that let so many poor young men of color fall perilously through the cracks.

Fado, often described as 'urban folk music', emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. It is known for its strong emphasis on loss, memory and nostalgia within its song texts, which often refer to absent people and places. One of the main lyrical themes of fado is the city itself. Fado music has played a significant role in the interlacing of mythology, history, memory and regionalism in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Elliott considers the ways in which fado songs bear witness to the city of Lisbon, in relation to the construction and maintenance of the local. Elliott explores the ways in which fado acts as a cultural product reaffirming local identity via recourse to social memory and an imagined community, while also providing a distinctive cultural export for the dissemination of a 'remembered Portugal' on the global stage.

Is there a new need and place for God-talk in Europe? The present volume both confirms this and opens up new questions for discussion. It shows how different traditions of naming and thinking God in Europe draw on various theoretical and philosophical foundations that are in competition with one another in many ways. Due to socio-cultural, historical and political divides between Eastern and Western Europe, these theological traditions often suffer from isolation and mutual misunderstanding. Can the inherent tensions and conflicts be understood more adequately? While exploring a variety of approaches in Europe on the topic, several authors also ask: How can God be named and thought in Europe, which finds itself in the midst of complex crosscultural and interreligious processes - particularly as immigration increases and peoples of non-Christian faith traditions name and think God in ways that differ from and sometimes conflict with Europe's dominant religion(s) and secular culture? What function and impact will traditional God-talk have in a globalizing Europe as religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism move into the foreground? This volume not only reveals the broad spectrum of its topic but also documents the vivid seeking undertaken by a new generation of European theologians and scholars of religion who openly engage the question of how to live and believe in Europe today, facing complex global challenges.

In this heart-pumping sci-fi sequel to In the City of Time, two people have to work together to prevent the cataclysm that will soon break the laws of physics and render Earth uninhabitable. Now in possession of the most dangerous book ever scribed, Willa and Saudade settle into the nineteenth century and start planning how to avert the cataclysm that will soon break the laws of physics and render Earth uninhabitable. Faraz only wants his best friend, Leo, to have the time to come to terms with the death of his father—even if his father was a power-hungry villain who had to be stopped. But someone has stolen the editbook again, and now Faraz and his friends must track down Willa and challenge her for control of the editbook. Meanwhile, Leo’s older brother Aris contemplates a path toward redemption after using the editbook to destroy the city of Napoli. Can he salvage his remaining relationships, after a lifetime of following their father? But as far as Willa and Saudade are concerned, all these people are suspects in a crime that hasn’t happened yet.