One Impossible Step: Selected Poems

A selection of extraordinarily condensed, emotionally complex, philosophical poems by one of the most unique and highly regarded 20th century Brazilian poets.

In her lifetime, Orides Fontela resisted all labels, all attempts to situate her work in a particular movement, school, tendency, or tradition. Here, in her first ever English-language collection, Fontela’s poetry continues to defy easy categorization. In these concise, meditative poems, Fontela’s bird and flower, water and stone, blood and star can be read as symbols, indicating a possible tendency toward mysticism. Including an illuminating statement of poetics and excerpts from her often acerbic interviews, One Impossible Step introduces English-language audiences to an iconoclast who remains one across languages and decades.

Orides Fontela was born in 1940 in São João da Boa Vista, in the interior of São Paulo, and died in 1998. She studied philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). In 1969 her first book, Transposição, was published, followed by four more collections. Her third collection, Alba (1983), won the Jabuti Prize, one of the most important prizes in Brazil. In France, a large selection of her poems appeared in translation under the title Trèfle (2000). In 2006 the Brazilian publishing house Cosac Naify published her collected poems, Poesia Reunida. 

Chris Daniels is a prolific, widely published, autodidact and feral translator of global Lusophone poetry. Recent translations include ​​a black body by Lubi Prates (Nueva York Poetry Press, 2020) and The Hammer by Adelaide Ivánova (Commune Editions, 2019). He lives in Oakland, California.