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Through a Grainy Landscape
Millicent Borges Accardi adds luster to her acclaim as a leading poet of the Portuguese-American experience with a new collection of breathtaking scope. She inhabits the new artistic frontier in exploring what heritage means to those descended from immigrants long established in the place of their dreams—"a dark mixture of all I have lost."
"Millicent Borges Accardi’s marvelous new book Through a Grainy Landscape, with a 'gentle kind of new urgency,' reminds us what we’ve abandoned and what we hold close, one “holding note of the wind” that just might carry us to the other side of the body’s 'distant lost city,' carry us over the once green road, through another land...
"... Not for the political 'storm gone blind,' not for the horror of 'banishments and cleansings,' or grief’s 'shrapnel under the skin,' but for that 'rush of a wave' where humans, once 'sawed in half' can still hold hands like 'a magic trick/ like dirty rivers, seeking a new mouth,' a new 'country/ joined to water,' thereby, a new home we can call unfinished compassion. Inspired by Portuguese and Portuguese-American poetry, Accardi employs the vernacular of grace and certainty, bringing to life the straightforward, narrative intimacy of belonging to one world. Read this book for its power and proposal of hope."
— Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous; Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books; Literary Programs Director, The Ruskin Art Club
"This collection of poems is as lush and volcanic as the Azorean landscape, grounded in earthiness, rich with the yearning for the sea, and seasoned with saudade. Accardi articulates in words and empty spaces, the longing of widows, fisherwomen and daughters, left behind on the shore, longing for the return of their loves or the chance to find adventure themselves. These are powerful women who, though isolated, in the end wait for no one to make their own magic."
— PaulA Neves, author of capricornucopia (the dream of the goats)
Read more about this book: https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/through-a-grainy-landscape/
Reviews of Through a Grainy Landscape
Contrapuntos. Review by Robert Simon, spring 2023
Litshark review and interview by McKenzie Lynn Tozan, October 2023
Sticks & Stones, review of Through a Grainy Landscape by Erica Goss, December, 2023 (upcoming)
Tinderbox, review of Through a Grainy Landscape by Allison Bird Treacy , spring 2023
Interviews--
Gávea-Brown, A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters spring 2023, interview by Francisco Fagundes (pages 1-9)
About the Author
Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry books. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She’s led poetry workshops at Keystone College, Nimrod Conference, Rhode Island College, The Muse in Norfolk, Virginia, and the University of Texas, Austin. She has held notable readings at University of California at Riverside, Brown University, Rutgers, UMass Dartmouth, and the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois. She lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA where she curates two literary reading series: Kale Soup for the Soul and Loose Lips.
