More on: Jessica Goudeau

Are diamonds indestructible? My love is more. Is the sea immense? My love is greater, more beautiful unadorned than a field of flowers. Sadder than death, more despondent than a wave beating the cliff, tougher than the rock. My love loves and knows nothing more than that it loves. ⋅ Translated from the Portuguese by…

God does not give me peace. God is my goad. He bites my heel like a snake, makes himself verb, meat, glass shard, stone against which my head bleeds. I cannot rest in this love. I cannot sleep in the light of this eye fixed on me. I want to return to my mother’s womb,…

One day, picking guavas with the girl, she lowered the branch and said to the air —unaware that she was teaching me— Guava is a blessed fruit. Her movement, her illuminated face agitated the dust and spirit in the air: The Kingdom is within us; God dwells in us. There is no escaping the hunger…

The theologians all err when they describe God in their treatises. You sharpen me until I could have made that irreparable cut. God will be born again to rescue me. Kill me, Jonathan, with your knife. Free me from the captivity of time. I want to understand your nails; the plan is not fixed, your…

Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in Image issue 91.   The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At…