I still dream about you sometimes
it doesn’t make sense, it’s like
those dreams where I have
to come back to school to take
math classes, it’s weird
but I go, I’m late, and I never remember
how to solve the equation, and it seems
unfair to spend my time on
useless problems now, I get stressed
and then I realize: I’m dreaming.
you’re there though
I don’t wanna see you, it’s strange
we don’t talk to each other
even in my dreams because
my body keeps
the memory of the exhaustion
of our last conversations,
the endless repetitions,
there’s nothing left to say.
I wake up wondering
How can I dream the silence?
Made of Dream
Stephanie Borges
Translated by Livia Azevedo Lima
December 2023
Made of Dream... opens a wandering space for thinking, a space that is both a vehicle and its traveler.
Román Luján
In a short collection of poems about dreams, Stephanie Borges observes how images and language can create experiences of freedom for Black women. In her verses, individual and collective experiences are evoked by voices that dissolve and blur the boundaries of the self. The tension between body and language emerges among the many possible meanings of a dream. As an element of waking life, imagination blends with daily tasks, because a dream is also something that demands work, dedication and choices, just like writing.
About the Author
Stephanie Borges (1984) is a poet and translator. She lives in Rio de Janeiro. She has translated works by Claudia Rankine, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Margaret Atwood and Jericho Brown into Brazilian Portuguese. Her first poetry collection, Talvez precisemos de um nome para isso (Maybe We Need a Name for This), received the IV Prêmio Cepe Nacional de Literatura.
Praise
A renowned translator of Black authors into Portuguese —from Audre Lorde and bell hooks to Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown— Stephanie Borges’ writing interrogates multiple territories at once: the landscape of dreams, the physical setting in which the poem is written, the space to simultaneously honor and challenge the artistic foremothers that have forged a path for her writing and thinking, the realm that blooms in the consciousness of the reader. Her essays, articles, podcasts, tweets, and poems are devoted to creating and expanding a space for feminist liberation and racial solidarity. For Borges, the body is both playground and battleground, a site for personal and political reimagination. Made of Dream, her first collection of poems in English (self) co-translation opens a wandering space for thinking, a space that is both a vehicle and its traveler.
Román Luján
About the Translator
Livia Azevedo Lima (1989) is a multimedia editor and essayist with a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of São Paulo. She lives in Seattle. Alongside her editorial work, she curates the Travessias—Brazilian Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum and coordinates the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop.
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-96-1
Chapbook
Chapbook. 48 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books
Series: Señal #22