First Epistle to the Amphibians

Author: Ricardo Domeneck
Translator:  Chris Daniels
Publisher: World Poetry Books (2026)

In the first selected volume of Ricardo Domeneck’s work to appear in English, the acclaimed Brazilian poet constructs a hyperbolic spiral of artifice, rage, and tenderness.

A consummately international poet, Domeneck centers the body “in all its moisture and all its fluids,” while never settling on a master style. Writing with tenderness and anger about earthly experience, friendship, love, and nature, and reacting against the previous generation’s anti-lyrical, impersonal poesia de invenção, Domeneck introduced a dense corporeal lyricism salted with camp at its high and low limits into contemporary Brazilian experimental poetry. Chris Daniels’s translation draws from more than two decades of the poet’s work.