Tanto Tanto

Tanto Tanto, the title of Marina Carreira’s sexy, sultry third book of poetry is Portuguese for “so much,” and refers to the many roles the poet performs: as lover, mother, daughter, and artist. Central to this collection is the poet’s queer identity, and “Autobiography of a Fufa” (a Portuguese slur for lesbian) catalogs the speaker’s earliest, embarrassing experiences kissing girls, culminating in a more recent, truer expression of romantic love:

The last time I kissed a girl I was waiting for salvation in the   form of jazz and fado It was hot hard raining and I learned tanto tanto from the   museum of her body— that love is an art you curate with grief and not a choice like   the Oxford comma […]

We learn the lovers wed in secret because, as the proud daughter of Portuguese immigrants, the speaker must grapple with her family’s discomfort with her queerness: “I am / not the woman they came to America for.” Together, the couple builds a life between languages: “Two women holding hands: oração. / Two children joining them: família.” Against her immediate family’s disapproval of her lifestyle, Carreira’s use of Portuguese in the poems helps to shape the family she desires, preserving the linguistic heritage while disavowing the bigotry. 

Several poems give voice to an anthropomorphized vagina, including: “Pussy in Space,” “Pussy Cleans the Bathroom,” and “Pussy Writes Horror.” In the latter, an accident leaves the “protagonist […] a thirty-something genderqueer femme artist […] unable to love herself in the dirty, divine way she planned to,” consigned to “three days in solitary celibacy” (“‘It’s been 7 hours and 15 days,’ she sings, ‘bald and sad as Sinéad in the nineties’”). In every instance, the levity ultimately yields a profound tenderness in lamenting the distance between the speaker and her lover, and Carreira pulls off a love song that is equal parts serenade and saudade.