Ex-Voto: Poems of Adélia Prado
by Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Doré Watson
$20.95
“Ex-Voto calls us to relish the body, but to humble and mortify the soul. Prado lashes out at pomposity and dishonesty, including her own … preferring a frank and contradictory extravagance that may or may not be divine, and is unquestionably human.”
— Kate Schapira, Rain Taxi
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“Ex-Voto calls us to relish the body, but to humble and mortify the soul. Prado lashes out at pomposity and dishonesty, including her own … preferring a frank and contradictory extravagance that may or may not be divine, and is unquestionably human.”
— Kate Schapira, Rain Taxi
“The Brazilian poet Adélia Prado talks to Jesus the way most people talk to their neighbors. She calls him Jonathan. She tells him, ‘you’re so good to us,/ roses, removable dentures/ tufts of grass like tiny palm trees.’ Watson lovingly recreates all the candor and incantatory music in these offbeat poems. There is never a day that can’t be improved with a few lines by Adélia Prado.”
— Idra Novey, “My Poetry Picks for 2013,” The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog
“Such intensities are exactly what Brazilian poet Adélia Prado presents us with in Ex-Voto. This is the second collection of her poetry to be translated by the American poet Ellen Doré Watson, whose lyrical yet colloquially beautiful English captures the range of tonal energies of Prado’s work.”
— Fred Marchant, at Ron Slate’s On the Seawall
“Whether one is a Christian or not, the sheer ardor of Prado’s spiritual journey in Ex-Voto will carry one to a heightened level of awareness about what it means to exist in the world. Prado has a voice that is singular and romantic, and her poetry expresses all the beauty and agony experienced by a mystic.”
—Sonja James, The Journal of West Virginia
“Adélia Prado’s most recent collection of poems, once more in Ellen Doré Watson’s superbly energetic and natural English, is nothing like any poetry I know in our present moment. Her humor, her dancing solidity, her joy in being alive — I think back to Chaucer, and the poems of Grace Paley. Prado is similarly voluble, playful, down to earth, and cheerful; and she seems to have an uncannily easy-going, even merry relationship with God and all his family. She has given us a perfectly crystalline ex-voto.”
—Jean Valentine
Ex-Voto is the second collection of Prado’s poetry translated by Ellen Doré Watson. Their previous collaborative volume, The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), was abundantly praised:
“The life captured in Prado’s poems is convulsive: from a dark corner of despair she can rocket to pure joy in one line… This is poetry at its hottest and most naked…”
—James Tate
“A major poet of the Americas. In Watson’s hands, Prado’s work arrives in English as if it had never left Portuguese. I send… bouquets of gratitude.”
—Carolyn Forché
About the Author: Adélia Prado has authored eight volumes of poetry and seven volumes of literary prose in Portuguese. The first in her family of laborers to see the ocean or go to college, Prado has lived all her life in the provincial industrial city of Divinópolis in Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has degrees in Philosophy and Religious Education from the University of Divinópolis, and she worked for many years as a schoolteacher.
About the Translator: Ellen Doré Watson was hailed by Library Journal as one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Her collections of poetry include Ladder Music and We Live in Bodies (Alice James, 2001 and 2002), This Sharpening (Tupelo, 2006), and most recently Dogged Hearts (book and audio book: Tupelo, 2010). She has also translated a dozen books, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado(Wesleyan University Press, 1990) and works by Brazilian poet Ignácio de Loyola Brandão as well as contemporary Arabic poetry (co-translated with Saadi Simawe). She is the Poetry and Translation Editor for The Massachusetts Review and the director of The Poetry Center at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Watson’s poems have appeared widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Among her awards and honors are the Bullis-Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a 1990 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant.
In 2011, she was appointed an Elector of the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
