No Gods Live Here

Conceição Lima was born in 1961 in the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, where she resides today. She studied journalism in Portugal and attended graduate school in London, where she later worked as a producer at the BBC’s Portuguese Language Service. She has published four books of poetry: O Útero da Casa (The Womb of the House) in 2004, A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó (The Painful Root of the Micondó) in 2006, O País de Akendenguê (The Country of Akendenguê) in 2011, and Quando Florirem Salambás no Tecto do Pico (When Velvet Tamarinds Flower on Pico de São Tomé) in 2015. Her work in Shook’s translation has appeared in the Literary Review, Jai-Alai, and World Literature Today.Shook is a poet and translator whose work with Conceição Lima has been recognized with a 2017Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and as a winner of the 2021 WordsWithout Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.

Winner of the 2021 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation ContestWinner of the 2025 Northern California Book AwardMs. Magazine, Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025"Lima maps the legacy of slavery and violence onto the island, ever-attentive to what lay beneath its seemingly innocuous buildings, including her own home." —Poetry Foundation"Carefully curated, beautifully translated… The poems in this volume brim with intensity and poignancy." —World Literature Today"Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis." —NewSouth Books"Lima should be considered a major contemporary African poet; hopefully the publication of No Gods Live Here, which makes so much of her work available in English translation, will raise her profile beyond the Portuguese-speaking world." —Portuguese Studies"This prize-winning translation haunts. In the vein of a paracolonial text, the poem examines the specters of a racialized human commodity and its ecological aftermath. As if magic or conjure, ‘Afroinsularity’ launches with hints of ghosts and ends in a colony of haints. The reading of each deftly interpreted line thrusts the reader to beautifully confront the ways in which land holds the stories that history attempts to colonize, and how land will out the truth until the long-buried rest." —Airea D. Matthews, 2021 Judge of the Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest"Conceição Lima has emerged in the postcolonial period as one of lusophone Africa's foremost contemporary poets." —Russell G. Hamilton