When reading Lucas de Lima, I cannot help but think of Nathaniel Mackey’s interest in the Kaluli myth of the boy who, in lament, turns into a muni bird and half cries half sings a song mourning the annihilation of kinship. De Lima’s poetry vibrates a necessary dark song of cultural reclamation that presupposes its legitimacy, its rights as having come first. Because I am only excited by poems that have duende, I am tremendously excited by this work—duende in the black sounds that pierce through so much performative violence, so much nothingness.

An activation, a site of fury, a grief that imagines a horizon of healing, Lucas de Lima’s Tropical Sacrifice measures the sky and flies as it sees into pasts and futures. Attuned to colonization, ecological destruction, and the continuities of violence in the machinations of global empire, this oneiric, necessarily disturbing, multi-voiced story-saga grieves as it redresses “until we become again the fractured wave / the world never wanted.” Visionary, defiant, dazzling.

Lucas de Lima’s Tropical Sacrifice is an anti-fascist oneiromantic narrative conjuring against ge(n)ocidal practices of settler colonialism, namely murder, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous languages, syncretism, and otherwise forgotten other(ed) wisdoms. The book opens with acknowledgement and implication of a self who emerges in the schism--the break--of the chiasm, “I am a colonized & / colonizing animal.” Here, de Lima recognizes chicken metamorphosis as a tradition of foremothers pitted against the Human as an exclusionary category. de Lima unsettles in their intimate treatment of revolutionary, queer historical figures targeted by the Brazilian and US states and by modeling careful practices of, if not citation, celebration. This book is divinatory and one after my own heart in its mystic eagerness to live-constellate a decolonized sky. de Lima writes, “everything is sad / for jchrist everything we say / streaks atmosphere / with wire,” witnessing the partitioning of the “crumbly sky" above in apocalypse, watching it “for breaking glass,” “for shattering.” Tropical Sacrifice is a triumph in celebration of Black Indigenous life, queer intimacy, and abolitionist fervor—it’s gorgeous, gets gross, recalls ulterior gnoses that peck against the heart-ear, against the glass “inside the national museum” where “a skull older than any … speaks to us engulfed in flames.” A marvel.

A spell and invocation, anti-prayer and rant, cri-de-coeur and rallying cry, Lucas de Lima’s Tropical Sacrifice is a queer poetic event of continuous lyric & narrative transformation. This mind-bending, scale-shifting, post-post-colonial break-up and love poem encompasses Brazil and the global South, Indigenous and African spiritual traditions, and the contemporary social, political and cultural spheres as it engages the vital questions it poses. Tropical Sacrifice is not only a tour de force, it’s epic magnificence!

Staggering in scale and scope, Tropical Sacrifice reimagines episodes from the “mottled bloodbath” performed in the ongoing narrative of the colonizing and the colonized; the “race mixture and rape” that determined human and nonhuman life worlds on the recently nominated American hemisphere. A synthesis of material form and content, and along concrete typographic expanses, poetic sequences alternate with a gallery of color photographs. Lucas de Lima summons the Amazon set ablaze, epistemic devastation, ancestor memory, spiritual cosmologies, and political struggles. The coalescing histories include the case of alleged serial murderer Febrônio Índio do Brasil, the unsettling depravity of the recent Brazilian state, environmental mayhem, species relation, and violent sexual fantasies deputizing rage and sorrow in the wake of one’s lost erotic object. Along the way, poet and former lover mutually metamorphose into “disfiguring protrusions”—a display of poetic sorcery that honors the departed even as it dreams the birthplace of amazement.