Pip: osoparavos.com this week is essentially a literary continent — poems in Brazilian Portuguese, prose poems, satirical verse, fiction, and cultural guides all sharing the same address.
Mara: Adam Donaldson Powell is the author behind all of it — a wide-ranging collection that moves through surrender and joy, the body's slow negotiations with time, and what it means to exist between cultures and languages.
Pip: Let's start with the poems themselves.
Poetry of surrender, fire, and the body's quiet argument
Mara: This segment is about what the poems are actually doing — holding grief, desire, mortality, and resistance inside very compressed forms, and asking what it costs to stay present when the body or the world pushes back.
Pip: The anchor piece opens with four haiku-like movements under the title "Entrega" — surrender — and then expands into a long prose poem. Here is the line that holds the whole collection together: "Esta e a minha gloria: nao que eu esteja inteiro, mas que ainda possa viajar para alem da ruptura."
Mara: What that means in practice is that wholeness is not the standard. The poems are not about recovery — they are about the capacity to move past the break, even temporarily. That is a different and more honest claim.
Pip: The prose poem "Esteja aqui agora" earns that claim. A speaker navigates chronic illness — the blood's complaints, the tired corridors of bone and vein — and finds freedom not in the body but in the mind's ability to leave: "nos paises indomados do pensamento e do sonho, eu me torno livre."
Mara: Several other pieces in the collection press on related questions. "Passeando com o coagulo" follows an older man walking a blood clot through city streets three times a day, his cane marking time like a jazz drummer refusing to retire — the poem treats the walk itself as defiance.
Pip: And "A morte da poesia" does something wry with legacy: a creative writing professor who warned that poetry's death would bring intellectual senility now lives in a care home, telling the same stories on loop — and the speaker loves him for it anyway.
Mara: "Epitafio" strips the question down further — what remains after titles and manifestos dissolve. The poem answers: "o calor que mantive vivo entre mim e outro." Not the noise made, but the warmth kept.
Pip: "Sono / Vigilia" runs five movements through insomnia and the sleep that ambushes rather than arrives — each section a different texture of the same exhaustion.
Mara: "Entre nos, poetas" names the cost of the writing life directly: friendships thinned like worn paper, love tired of knocking at a door left closed because the speaker was busy trying to describe the sound of the knocking.
Pip: "A gaiola e bela; a mentira e feia" scales that personal pressure outward — a long indictment of beauty culture, optimization, and the machinery of inadequacy, ending with a stubborn residue: "uma dor primitiva por alegria nao comprada."
Mara: "Querido Corpo" takes a gentler angle — a letter from mind to body proposing a truce after decades of mutual blame, asking whether they can face the new phase with dignity, "como o casal que sempre deveríamos ser."
Pip: "Pensando em um amante morto" says everything in three lines. "As memorias que nunca vao embora — um amor morto." That is the whole poem.
Mara: "Uma apologia da identidade" is the longest and most formally ambitious piece here — a sustained interior monologue about desire that refuses easy objects, naming the pattern plainly: attraction to resistance, to the closed door, to the man who cannot be had.
Pip: It is a confession that keeps catching itself mid-sentence, which is the point. "Controle e um pobre substituto para conquista" — the speaker knows the logic is broken and names it anyway.
Mara: "A audacia da imperfeicao" runs the same circuit in compressed form — seven lines, each beginning with an adverb, tracing the full arc from hope through retaliation to unlearned lessons.
Pip: "A discussao," "entre nos, meio-irmaos," and "entre dois mundos" move the lens outward — a Brazilian and an Argentine dissolving a restaurant standoff over cold beer, Portugal and Brazil trading resentments across the Atlantic, and a Rio dinner where the food left uneaten becomes a reckoning with proximity to poverty.
Mara: The LGBTQ+ novel excerpt, "O Perseguidor," introduces Rachel, five years old, hiding in a closet while her mother's moods swing between "meu precioso botao de rosa" and accusations — and the moment when two alter personalities, Veronica and Emily, first appear.
Pip: "Deus diz: tsc, tsc, tsc" is God, irritated, clarifying that willful obtuseness was never in the contract. "Eu lhe dei uma mente — nao um objeto decorativo para juntar poeira ao lado de suas conviccoes." Brisk.
Mara: The collection also includes "Carta ficticia de uma idosa russa para Vladimir Putin," written in the voice of a ninety-six-year-old woman asking whether he can find a way back to being a respected world leader — gentle in tone, pointed in substance.
Pip: And "carta ficticia de salai aos admiradores do retrato da mona lisa" — Salai claiming the portrait is an anagram of his name, and that the Mona Lisa has always been a joke everyone missed.
Mara: The cultural guides — "manual para gringos," "Caro Gringo," "O Gringo e o Apartamento 302," and "Terra do Depende" — run alongside all of this, mapping Brazilian social codes, the philosophy of "semi-mobiliado," and the country's talent for holding contradictions simultaneously.
Pip: Which is also, it turns out, what the poems do. The territory of the next episode will likely need a bigger map.
Mara: What stays is the consistency of the move — from rupture toward something that keeps going anyway, whether that is a walk, a poem, a cold beer, or a letter written by hand.
Pip: The body, the language, the borrowed country — all of it asking the same question in different forms. Next time, we find out what else the continent holds.
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