"Caetano speaks of a self that has been torn in two and that—musically, wisely, tenderly—no longer yearns for unity."
— Lucy Ives
About the Book
Imagined as a series of experiments in autobiography, Caetano invokes the name of the author’s grandfather to write toward the mystery of family, originals, and their ruptures, breaks, and re-imaginings. Written from distinct positions in time, the poems in this collection think about the (im)possibility of faithful reproduction, the space between an original and its translation, and the moving target of a portrait as it moves through different narrative forms.
Author
Alexis Almeida
is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Things I Have Made a Fiction (winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize). She is most recently the translator of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems (The Song Cave), and her translation of Laura Fernández’s There’s a Monster in the Lake will be out with Graywolf in late 2026. She lives in New York and edits 18 Owls Press.
Praise
"The sentence invites reversal, a one hundred and eighty degree rotation. I feel that the lyric is asking me to reason it out – keep the grammar intact, and (re)write this into its opposite. A whole new text clinging to the underbelly of what is immediately there. Almeida brings these poems into plurality."
— Alison Graham
"In
Caetano, Alexis Almeida brilliantly conjures forms for exploring the porous liminality between thought and feeling, dream and reality, within and without. Almeida builds a poetic ontology lush with the intricacies of lived experience, desire, motherhood, and daily care. I love living in the warm realms of this book."
— Alli Warren
"The poems in
Caetano hit with the stoned clarity of a psilocybin trip’s long downslope, post-bliss and preternatural. I’m talking about the minor psychedelia of a great sentence’s unfolding, the way it swings the sense around. And what’s sense’s content? Apprehensions of life and death. Which Almeida finds everywhere in these quotidian auto portraits where total syntactic calm makes meaning crackle and convulse."
— Ben Krusling
"This is the sweetest book I've read in a long time. Full of translucent, precious substances found in the everyday,
Caetano speaks of a self that has been torn in two and that—musically, wisely, tenderly—no longer yearns for unity."
— Lucy Ives
"With the intuitive truancy of a child, Alexis Almeida tests autobiography’s boundaries to see what they can hold.
Caetano includes not just what actually happens, but also: what never happens, what happens only in dreams and fantasies, and also what happens only in these sentences. And what sentences! Structured by the pull between mother and child, writer and world, moving “in the way of a feeling,” they carry us along with care, dreamy and sweet. “Who will see the sentence lighting up” Almeida asks. The answer, dear reader, is you! Lucky you!"
— Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
Excerpt
from “Things I Have Made A Fiction”
I wrote a book about beginnings – so much courage at beginnings – where I could experience each thing I wrote at its start, so if I wanted to write about driving across the desert in New Mexico for several days, I could experience this desire across several pages, in small imaginary bursts, and without actually getting to enjoy it (this would have meant the beginning was over), but the entire time I was writing I felt there should also be another book, one that held all the things that were missing from this one, where things had to be finished, and where they would become real.
Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-59-0
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
