capricornucopia (the dream of the goats) by paulA neves

paulA neves’ imagination thrives at the rich intersection of Luso-American identity and womanhood, a place where the life-long questions about love, beauty, and loss take shape, and where the compelling journey of the poet’s emotional and intellectual labors originate. Fiercely curious, capricornucopia offers a feast for the discerning taste, each page an exploration “always polishing the surfaces,/ hoping to find what’s underneath” the attractions and motivations of culture, language, and the impassioned heart.

–Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden

capricornucopia (the dream of the goats) invites readers to experience the daily tastes, smells and emotions that tell the story of family. Here are lives lived on the edge of a broader knowing and an insularity, an open heart tempered by the visions of an old soul, poetry infused with images of food and prayer, encompassing a reaching out between and beyond immigrant, American, and regional slag, tough street talk from the Ironbound.

—Millicent Borges Accardi, author of Only More So

neves’ poems circle delicately like “birds . . . red heralds / stillborn in the throat” around the many sacrifices of giving to the light, which in Portuguese (dar a luz) is the idiom for giving birth.  capricornucopia returns time and again to considerations of “how our mother tongue / forgets the word for missed” and how being lost or being found is often one and the same thing.

—Carlo Matos, author of It’s Best Not to Interrupt Her Experiments