Marília Garcia is among the most captivating Brazilian poets of her generation. Her poems are cerebral, playful, and slyly romantic, enamored of language and its pitfalls while offering fragments of a fraught lover’s discourse—their various facets call to mind Lyn Hejinian, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ana Cristina Cesar. In The Territory Is Not the Map, Garcia’s geographical imagination wanders through airports and metro stations from Rio to Berlin to Paris to São Paulo, across deserts, in skidding cars, to encounters at the bottom of the sea. Hilary Kaplan takes these points of departure to an original, daring translation, alive with poetic energy.

Marília Garcia’s poems in The Territory Is Not the Map are an instantly infectious blend of narrative portraits and metaphysical musings. Her oneiric excursions and meditations on language end on startlingly sensual notes, like when Garcia leaves her green flip flops in an airport in Berlin, and discovers upon returning home that the only memento she still has is “the memory of what already existed before the trip.”  I am becoming increasingly addicted to Hilary Kaplan’s expert translations of contemporary Brazilian poets. They are not to be missed.

Otherwise banal and commonplace images and situations are transformed into hyperbolic engagements with existence, where every essence has the capacity to represent the most prolific and disturbing statements on time, life, and a gravity of being... [The book’s] emotional affect, rooted in sadness, anger, remorse, or otherwise, maintains an imperceptible or subliminal position within the book’s spine. In its place sits, positioned high, strength and resolve of a curious and empathetic poetics.