Rilke shake (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), a collection of 45 short poems, is the first book by the young Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas. The title, a pun on milkshake (which in Brazil’s vernacular means just what it does in English), indicates the book’s contents: poetry approached as a shake of languages, words, canonical tradition and a measure of delight, whirred in postmodernity's ironic blender. The often first-person poems grapple with shaking off the influence of not only Rilke but also Shakespeare (the pun is not lost), Stein, Keats, Moore, Bishop, Bashō, Blake, Brodsky and Pound. In “não consigo ler os cantos” (“i can’t manage to read the cantos”) the speaker, established as female at the beginning of the book, asks the revolutionary and rhetorical question, “vamos nos livrar de ezra pound?/…/vamos nos livrar de mariane moore?” (“shall we free ourselves from ezra pound?/.../shall we free ourselves from marianne moore?”). Since she can't shake free of these titans, she shakes them together with everything else real and imagined from her life—family, languages learned or overheard, travels, dreams, homeland, and so on—to see if anything tasty results.

Born 8 April 1973 in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Freitas studied journalism at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, then worked as a reporter in São Paulo. She now lives in Pelotas and Holland, where she is translating poetry and working on a second book. She has published poems in the Brazilian journal Inimigo Rumor, and in Diário de Poesía (Argentina) and aguasfurtadas (Portugal). A translation of “love (collage)” appeared in Issue 6 (Spring 2007), dedicated to Brazilian poetry, of the American poetry journal Aufgabe; translations into English of “What is a tschüsstschüss?” (“o que é um baibai?”) and “Love, a collage” can be found in the German online art magazine Hilda. Freitas’ work is also included in the anthology Cuatro poetas recientes de Brasil (Buenos Aires: Black & Vermelho, 2006). She co-edits the Brazilian poetry journal Modo de Usar & Co (in print and online at revistamododeusar.blogspot.com) and keeps her own blog, tome uma xícara de chá (loop.blogspot.com).

Despite Freitas’ web presence, which places her in the global network of innovative poets who have made a home online, I discovered Rilke shake last summer the old-fashioned way: browsing the shelves at a bookstore, Porto Alegre’s venerable Livraria Cultura. Rilke shake is one of about eight books in the Série Bolso (Pocket Series) of new poetry published by Cosac Naify.(1) This text, and the series it is part of, arrive at a moment when small-press publishing of poetry is taking off in Brazil, and poetry magazines and collectives are being newly formed.

It is difficult to say now exactly where Rilke shake, a brand-new work, might fit into literary history, Brazilian or global. When it comes to Brazilian literature, Ricardo Domeneck, Freitas’ sole English-language reviewer, warns away from placing her “into a literary system, canon, history addicted to the linear,” insisting instead that “Publishing in a Brazilian poetic context that follows critical axioms which have been frozen for the last decades, based on abstract concepts [such] as ‘precision’ or ‘concreteness’ as values in themselves, her poems establish a new path for a relationship with a non-authoritarian tradition.”(2) Domeneck’s description of Concrete poetry as “abstract” is comically paradoxical, but he rightly points out that Freitas breaks from the legacy of the Concretists all too visible in some Brazilian poetry today. She certainly favors concrete nouns and imagery, albeit arranged in what appears as casually non-visual free verse. Concrete images subtly and brilliantly double for the highly abstract ideas, such as identity, phenomenology, and the self, which abound in this work.


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