Dead Things and Where to Put Them

Coming October 7th
Preorder now!

Dead Things and Where to Put Them is a compelling look at family, marriage, and motherhood during a pandemic. The exploration of loss within the context of various relationships provides a nuanced look at how grief manifests in everyday life, especially in the face of isolation and uncertainty. Carreira’s third collection highlights moments of strength, connection, and hope, and inspires readers to locate their own resilience amidst loss and the unprecedented.

Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet and artist from Newark, NJ. A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2024 Luso-American fellow in the DISQUIET Literary Program, Carreira is the author of Desgraçada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (CavanKerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, and Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Carreira works in higher education and teaches women and gender studies at Kean University. Find her on Instagram at @savethebathewater.

from Flower Moon

I blame my follies on this flower moon
and not the woman breaking my heart.

I sit in my tub and fill it with tears until
I am under everything warm and wavy,

far from the new normal. Before bed, I’m a hare
baring her teeth at the Goddess who swallowed

my dreams and left an egg in their place.
She’ll mistake this for a smile, like everyone else.

*****

from Prayer to Saint Brigid

How long can you survive

surviving? I am ready
for the changing

of the light, for birthing
of lambs. I am ready

for life again, that messy,
moist, marvelous thing.

Marina Carreira’s Dead Things and Where to Put Them takes up Mary Oliver’s mantel with exquisite poems about baby rabbits’ “buttoned eyes and tiny ears, bodies / sleek with new fur and soil,” a “white, worm moon / wriggling her big belly across the backyard grass,” and “[t]he glimmering eye of a doe greeting the morning with a yawn.” Carreira goes a step further by placing her nature poems in the context of pandemic, patriarchy, whiteness, and a working-class girlhood in Newark. In “Litany for Surviving,” the speaker reflects on “[w]hat a privilege it is / to own this imagination. This safe, white skin. How dare I think of summer, / streams, and fauna when so many have yet to know freedom of such things?” This is not just a poetry book—it's a guide for how to love in this broken world.

—Claudia Cortese, author of Wasp Queen 

Through her deft lyricism and unflinching honesty, Carreira transforms the weight of loss into a symphony of resilience by tenderly excavating the intersections of familial love, cultural memory, and echoes of the past that refuse to be buried. Vivid and unforgettable, her poems span a mother rabbit mourning her lost young, the bittersweetness of geraniums in freshly turned soil, and the quiet resilience of daughters becoming their own. With Dead Things and Where to Put Them, Carreira doesn’t just give us poetry; she offers a map for navigating the in-betweens—between life and loss, joy and sorrow, the rooted and the fleeting, what exists and what may come. This collection doesn’t just move—it marks, reminding us of all the places we can carry what we’ve lost. 

—Angelique Zobitz, author of Seraphim 

Marina Carreira’s poems close in on the last wild things—the rabbits and squirrels, the children and poets—all the life that scrambles for a living in and around the houses and freeways of her city. Writing through the pandemic and political decay, through childhood and parenthood, she crosses the Atlantic line by line, weaving Portuguese into English, living inside the uneasy inheritance of ancestral sayings, wisdom and warning, blessing and curse. It’s the open heart and tender rage of these poems that I love the most—their will to survive, to produce new and better words to pass down the generations. May they last “o fim do mundo.’’

—Casey Walker, author of Last Days in Shanghai

96 pages
Marina Carreira
Pub date – October 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-13-0
Florenz Eisman Memorial Collection - Poetry