Description
Saudade for a Breaking Heart is a bittersweet twenty-first century feminist love song.
How does one sing a song both happy and sad, one that longs and mourns even as it celebrates and loves? SAUDADE FOR A BREAKING HEART takes its cue from the Portuguese concept of saudade to explore this space in an attempt to lyrically render the complexities of family, sexuality, gender, partnership, and love in the contemporary world.
"I’ve almost never read a book of poems that so closely and honestly tussles with oneself, wonders with oneself, listens to the deep internal argument by which the lyric is made, as Renzi’s SAUDADE FOR A BREAKING HEART. Nor have I often read such wondering—heart-broken, witness to horror and sweetness both, puzzled, lovestruck, funny, repulsed, frightened, fleshy, stained, in the supermarket, in the bed, in the park, in the book, in the body’s deepest rooms—so precisely rendered, or crafted, or spoken, or sung as music. Goddamn this is a beautiful book." —Ross Gay
Poetry.
Author Bio
Kristen Lucia Renzi is an Associate Professor of English at Xavier University, where she teaches and researches in the areas of Transatlantic 19th-20th Century Literature, Gender/Race/Class, and Embodiment. She is the author of poetry monograph The God Games and Other Voices (Main Street Rag Press, 2017) and scholarly monograph An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women's Choice Not to Know (SUNY Press, 2019). She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, her two daughters, and their canine and feline companions.
Author City: CINCINNATI, OH USA