A review by unidentifiedgemstone
Cuíer by Caio Fernando Abreu

emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective fast-paced

3.5

As many other reviewers have shared, this collection could do with an introduction. There is a section in the back of the book that provides brief biographies for each author that I read before going into each piece, but still I think the collection would have been aided by an explanation of why these pieces were chosen and how they're tied together. I did enjoy my time overall, but there were certain pieces where I very much struggled to understand what was going on or, what, exactly, I was supposed to gain through reading it. I have a few possible culprits here: firstly, I'm not much of a poetry reader and I may not have been quite trained enough to discern meaning from certain poems, secondly, I worry the translation may have been ineffective and, lastly, there simply might have been a wedge driven between myself and the texts due to our cultural barriers: I am not Brazilian, nor am I Brazilian-American, and I do not speak Portuguese.

That being said, this was still a fun and refreshing reading experience. I'd like to list my favorite pieces, the ones that I did get quite a lot out of: "Fat Tuesday" by Caio Fernando Abreu (and "Three Letters for Beyond the Walls" by the same author, but I especially enjoyed "Fat Tuesday"), "A New House" by Carol Bensimon, the poetry of Tatiana Nascimento, "Farrina" by Cidinha da Silva, and the poetry of Ricardo Domeneck (particularly "Shyness in Linen").