Dead Things and Where to Put Them

Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Desgracada, Tanto Tanto, Save the Bathwater, and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back.

• To the Mother Rabbit in My Back YardDesgraçadaPenumbraO Que Não Mata, EngordaFazer FigaThe Forest for the TreesNewark Penn StationMeditations on a Mid-Life CrisisOde to the Deer on the Side of the Road as AmericaThe Music of AnimalsCathexisFolkloreTen Ways of Looking at a MotherFlower MoonPandemicHaibun for My hairPerfect CirclesIt Is A Serious Thing Just To Be AlivePai Eats PieOn Earth DayPrayer to Saint PhilomenaWorm MoonIn The Forest at MidnightThere are Escapes and There are True ThingsDeath is So Everywhere and So EntireOde to the Temporal LobeWolf MoonA Valley SomewhereAubadePoem for When I Don’t Want to be a PoetSeagullDollar Store MaryAin’t That The WayApril 24A Wild TimeToday, or Daydream about Leaving the HouseYour BlueVesperPrayer to Saint BrigidMatinMissing PlutoDead Things and Where to Put ThemTonsureEulogy for the Dairy Queen on MarketVariation on a Theme by Rachel McKibbensLitany for the SurvivingStrayElegy for Maria Vicente MeirelesUngrateful Bitch BluesDearest,After LifeLove at the End of the WorldNew Year’s DaySonnet for Saint AudreBig StepsBuck MoonMetempsychosisOoms Conservation AreaAt The EndTapestry, or Now I Love GreenSwingDesgraçadaTo The Baby Rabbits in My Backyard

"Marina Carreira's Dead Things and Where to Put Them takes up Mary Oliver's mantel with its exquisite poems about baby rabbits' "buttoned eyes and tiny ears, bodies / sleek with new fur and soil," a "white, worm moon / wriggling her big belly across the backyard grass," "The glimmering eye of a doe greeting the morning with a yawn." Carreira goes a step further by placing her nature poems in the context of pandemic, patriarchy, whiteness, a working-class girlhood in Newark. In "Litany for Surviving," the speaker reflects on "[w]hat a privilege it is / to own this imagination. This safe, white skin. How dare I think of summer, / streams and fauna when so many have yet to know freedom of such things?" These poems wooshed through my body in a rush of beauty, vulnerability, lyricism. This is not just a poetry book—it's a guide for how to love in this broken world."