In its insistence on allegory, Freitas’ poetry also evokes tradition. Rilke shake is innovative, exciting, and unique. Its advantage vis-à-vis history is only that it is more recent.

Like a good young poet, particularly a disciple of Rilke, Freitas takes up the canon as a thematic struggle in Rilke shake. She names and directly engages her forbears; she dreams about them, makes fun of them, elevates them, normalizes them. In addition to (or perhaps as part of) poetic lineage and influence, Freitas seems interested in lesbian poet couples; a series of poems feature Bishop and her Brazilian lover Lota de Macedo Soares, Stein and Toklas, as well as icons Djuna Barnes and Josephine Baker. Of Freitas’ influences, Bishop comes the closest to Brazilian, and none are Concretists. Rather, Freitas selects from the pervasive, thus problematic, Western canon, poets who stand out as blenders of cultures and nationalities.

With influences located outside Brazil, where might Freitas fit in a lineage of Brazilian poetry? Her turn outward actually works to pose an internally critical question: What is Brazilian poetry? (The correlative "What is Brazilian literature?" has always plagued Brazilian literary critics. Likewise, Rilke shake is unabashedly self-conscious, as in the poem “autofocus.”) Freitas is very Brazilian in, for example, her reference to Bashō and haiku in “o que é um baibai?”; Brazilians adore their haiku. She also follows an old Brazilian poetic tradition of taking inspiration from France, though her motives are quite different from those of Brazil's earliest poets, who looked to French poetry for a model of the Western identity they wanted their emerging nation to have. Rather than emulating, Freitas lifts; she throws French language into her mix along with the major languages of the Americas. She shakes French, Spanish, and English into her Portuguese, a Portuguese that is distinctive to Southern Brazil. Freitas' Brazilian poetic identity emerges as the language of poetry itself, anchored in word play; claiming all as her identity, she plays equally with all the tongues she employs.

Emphasis on word play places Freitas comfortably within a transnational network of younger poets (including post-Concrete Brazilians, post-Language poetry USAmericans, Europeans, and Latin Americans) for whom word play, web presence, and global engagement work as a set. Like Freitas, many of these poets are also translators. And as is now a matter of course among this cohort, word play and the internet often work in tandem to further linguistic exploration. Freitas' poem “love,” which has been translated and published twice in English, is, in Domeneck's words, a “googlage”—a collage of words found via Google search. Variations of this practice have been present among younger USAmerican poets since before the turn of the century, popularized by the Flarfists but certainly predating them. At this point, Freitas' integration of different source languages into her work is along the lines of collage, pastiche, or her invention, the shake. Her practice, whether internet-aided or not, pushes languages against each other, rather than locating and working in an interstice of language, or creating language that is interstitial or intermediate, as some poet-translators do (for example, Caroline Bergvall or Stacy Doris). What is this shake? It is a figure for poetic invention; it is the delicious mess of combination, old and new, that makes poetry. In Freitas’ vision, poetic formation is life formation. Life here occurs in concrete scenes—at a door, a soda shop, a dinner table—but the setting and its artifacts always point to the human interior; reflection and attempts at understanding the self predominate. Freitas’ shake is akin to US poet Juliana Spahr’s “hash” in Things of each possible relation hashing against one another (Palm Press 2003). The hash is a reworking of old and familiar material, a jumble, and like the shake, also a food. Why did Freitas choose the shake, a food of US origin? “Milkshake,” like so many English words imported from the US, has become part of the Brazilian lexicon. Adding Rilke, Freitas changes it—shakes it—