Tanto Tanto

Examining female queerness through the lens of first-generation culture, Tanto Tanto highlights two queer daughters of immigrants and the struggles they face in a romantic relationship in the presence of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity. The collection explores the consequences of queer love in both contemporary American and Luso-American societies and unsettles ideas about privilege, romantic love, queer motherhood, femininity, gender identity, and lesbian sex. These poems make visible and troubling what is often overlooked, misunderstood, and romanticized in “American” homosexuality.

Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Tanto Tanto (CavanKerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater(Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing to That Bird Knowing He Won’t Sing Back(Finishing Line Press, 2017). Marina is a recipient of the Sundress Academy for the Arts Summer 2021 Residency Fellowship. As a visual artist, she has exhibited her work at Morris Museum, Artfront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, and Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others.

Lines

You figuratively toe an invisible line in the metaphorical sand
say D’aqui não passo I won’t do X say Y believe Z
I do it too Shut my eyes while my mouth’s wide open to blare IMOs
convince you that even if you can’t see it I always mean it
And not a day goes by that we are not oil and water piano and pedestrian
potato potato In this exciting new battlefield of memes and quarrels
I discover telephone lines deliver the most fucked-up messages
that your mouth can spit fire and put it out at the same time
There is nothing worse than drawing lines particularly when
we are so desperate to cross them I’ll keep this in mind from now on
the way andorinhas muscle-memory between Lisbon and Porto
Maybe silence can build a footbridge from my bad nature to your good sense
Maybe it can say everything I want to but never do

When My Mother Tells Me I’ll Always Be a Loser

my heart jumps out through my mouth
and hauls ass toward your heart

pumping like a Newark boom box
a fired cannon red as fuck

dark as menstrual blood Your heart
will hug my heart hard as hell

tell it “Baby, it will be OK It’ll be fine
Remember amor, our mothers

inherited their cruelty and I got
so so so SO much love to fill

that hole inside you she keeps stuffing
with sawdust” My heart will nod,

blue but wiping away thick tears
the liver mistakes for rain My heart

will tell your heart she’s always wanted
a white picket fence but didn’t know it

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 // to take my coffee if you make it,” Carreira writes. This is a poet of so much dimension, so much rapture, who has uncovered the divine in nature (“marigolds and magnolias nippling the breasts of unseen gods”) and herself and has no time for “those who can’t see such fucking divinity.” I can’t wait to teach this book.
—Darla Himeles, author of Cleave

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, and original, as all love should be.

—Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta, author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere and editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity

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 centered 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 Tropicália and Mother/land

104 pages
Marina Carreira
Pub date – March 2022
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-90-7
Emerging Voices – Poetry