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 rings true in Alexis Levitin’s masterful translations. For readers who enjoy the complexity of Charles Simic, or the stylistically innovative syntax of César Vallejo, Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun is a sensually provocative amalgamation of both.
