In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhão integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual—butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time—resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. Writing in forms both fixed and free, Maranhão’s language suggests a jazz-like musicality that...
