This is a chapbook which – pace Keats’ famous warning – has palpable designs on us; it carries an unmistakable message of ecological concern. It wants us to see the full reality of the world in which we humans find ourselves; it wants us to have a fundamental respect for
all visible and invisible, all organic and inorganic, existence.
Even when the ostensible subjects are a human dilemma or a human emotion, the poetics are ecocentric, not egocentric. But the poems are not all ‘nature’ poems and their tone is cool rather than hot, a call to awakening and awareness rather than to action.
More specifically, Almeida’s unexpected line-breaks – which are neither breaks for sensenor pauses for breath – invite us to linger and think about the words on the page and in our heads. Her idiosyncratic re-formulation of scientific data encourages us to connect our human selves with the cosmos, on micro- and macro- planes, ‘the celestial mechanics / that endlessly shape us all’.
Throughout the collection, Almeida wishes to show us how it is possible to live with the consciousness of our tininess in the cosmic immensity and, simultaneously, with gratitude for all the ‘forgotten blessings’ of being human – and mortal – on this awe-inspiring, fragile and at times incredible planet.
-Lesley Saunders
MA and PhD in American Literature and Culture, School of Arts and Humanities – ULisboa, Portugal, where she was Invited Assistant Professor (2007-2020), teaching Literature, Contemporary Art, Visual Culture. Transdisciplinary post-doctoral project in Photography, Gender and Museum Studies. In 2013, co-edited with Sandra M. Gilbert Feminisms Today and Tomorrow (Anglo Saxonica III: 6), and edited Women and the Arts: Dialogues in Female Creativity (Peter Lang).
Published: essays, short stories, poems, and photographs in journals and anthologies; poems and photographs in Cosmos e Casas (Urutau, 2021); reflections and exercises for inner coherence in O Compasso do Amor: Guia para Alinhamento Interior (Edições Mahatma, 2025).
Works as a freelance writer, translator, photographer, healer, and cultural mediator.