Dead Things and Where to Put Them

Description: A collection that explores the beauty of survival in the face of upheaval and loss.

Marina Carreira's Dead Things and Where to Put Them shares the hardships of marriage and motherhood during a pandemic. The exploration of loss within the context of various relationships provides a nuanced look at how grief manifests in everyday life, especially in the face of isolation and uncertainty. Carreira's third collection highlights moments of strength, connection, and hope, and inspires readers to locate their own resilience amidst loss and the unprecedented. With vivid imagery and bittersweet moments, Carreira navigates the space between life and loss.

Brief description: Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Save the Bathwater and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won't Sing Back.

Review Quotes:

"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."