Winner of the Espiral Poetry Prize for Best Collection in Brazil, Portugal, Angola, and Galicia
Love. Sex. Death. Meat. Traffic. Pets. In Cattle of the Lord, Rosa Alice Branco offers a stunning poetic vision at once sacred and profane, a rich evocation of daily life troubled by
uneasy sacramentality.
In a collection translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a world turned upside down: darkly comic, sensual, and rife with
contradiction. Here, liturgical words become lovers’ invitations. Cows moo at the heavens. And chickens are lessons on the resurrection. Scraps of parable and verse, even ritual gestures,
wind through the poems, taking the words of scripture and rearranging their significance.
Over the course of the collection, Branco’s unorthodoxeven blasphemousreligious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that the physical, the quotidian, and the animalistic
are holy, too. In these poems, beast and man disappear into one another, both equally transcendent and equally fallen. The body and the spirit are always at odds; the body and the spirit are
one. And flesh, in all its meaningsthe body of the other, caressed; the animals we abuse, and eat; the sacrificial offering of Christdemands reverence.
Writing at the boundaries of sense and mystification, combining sensuous lyrics and wit with theological interrogation, Branco breaks down what we think we know about religion, faith, and
what it means to be human. Lord, how much compassion will it take for you,” her speaker cries, To be godfather at the Sunday barbecue?”
