In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa enters the imaginations of these gifted American poets like a frightening medicine, challenging them to self-divide, multiply, renounce stability, and relish in the dead-time that our culture so vehemently abhors. Like a slippery thorn in the myth of bigger, better individualism, Pessoa seems to have privately solicited these poets for disturbing conversations about nothing: a nothing that he promotes as everything.

-Larissa Szporluk

This lush florilegium of poetic evocations, variations, and inquiries is a beautiful testament to how far and fruitfully Pessoa's shadow reaches.

-Richard Zenith

This book is one of a kind. What it reveals is how a master of nothingness can inspire an endless fabric of thingness woven by others. This book offers us echoes and reechoes springing from a void. It is a reworking of Genesis. Overwhelming.

-Alexis Levitin

This superb anthology offers ample testimony to Pessoa's place now in the North American literary mainstream as well as to the momentum towards this distinction that has been building over time.

-On廥imo Almeida