Tanto Tanto

“Tanto Tanto is a rich, complex, and breathtaking tapestry of desire, longing, pleasure, sorrow, and, above all, love. The collection creates a fractal love letter centering on the relationship between the speaker and her wife, but also encompassing the love for their children, the self, poetry, and the body (with the latter as a sight of joy, pleasure, resilience, and spirit). With a voice that is marvelously both tender and vigorous, Carreira moves us to experience love in tuna sandwiches, the divine in the every day, and terror in driving home from the grocery store. Tanto Tanto celebrates the speaker’s love while also masterfully navigating the gifts and cruelties of inheritance growing up in a heteronormative working-class immigrant family, and the fear and violence of life as an immigrant LGBTQ woman in America. Tanto Tanto is gorgeous, sensual, intersectional, intimate and large, honest and real. I was enthralled and moved by this collection.” * Ananda Lima, author of 'Tropicalia' and 'Mother/Land' *
“Marina Carriera’s Tanto Tanto is an ode to love that is ‘kindling to kerosene’ yet from that fire it somehow invokes the creation of bridges between lands, families and bodies, silences and howls. This is a queer love that is rooted in an immigrant voice, one that both questions and desires the myth of the picket fence and the warmth of the quotidian. Be prepared for the lushness of the ocean and cephalopods and pussies that do house chores and write horror, all in homage of an ‘aquatic hallelujah’ that sings the siren song of adoration. I am in awe of this complex, scary, funny portrait of intimacy because it is truthful, brave, original, as all love should be.” * Grisel Y. Acosta, author of 'Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere' *
“In Tanto Tanto, Marina Carreira offers holy songs of queer devotion. This Luso-American daughter of immigrants writes ‘a dialect of resistance’ in which Portuguese queers English as naturally as ‘the way andorinhas muscle-memory between Lisbon and Porto.’ Here, holy water swells like the tides in moonlight to baptize beloveds: ‘I lay wet in my longing for the surge. . . the ocean I swallow whole.’ What lush odes to the body, to immigrant resilience and queer survival, and to the poet’s ‘most handsome tulip’ beloved with ‘tremendous tongue’: ‘There are so many ways I can learn