The Territory Is Not the Map

Marília Garcia (trans. Hilary Kaplan)

Airports, backpacks, dictionaries, hemispheres, The Territory Is Not the Map is a journey across Marília Garcia’s poetry. The distance between territory and map, a journey and the language used to write about it, the distance between languages. There is no straight line from one to the other—here there is displacement. Garcia takes on this displacement, exposes it by cutting, pasting, dismantling words; repeating and insisting; making holes in space and time. Images anchor: a pair of green flip-flops beside an airport bench, love as a red raincoat come from another poem. Everything can be a geographic error, an error as a way of being found. Garcia’s writing reverts a map’s usefulness: this is a map to get lost.

Marília Garcia (Rio de Janeiro, 1979) is the author of 20 poemas para o seu walkman (2007), Engano geográfico (2012), Um teste de resistores (2014), and Câmera lenta (2017). In 2015, she was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris, thanks to the support of the Icatu Prize for Arts. Her work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Flemish, and she has participated in festivals including Europalia, in Belgium, and Festival Internacional de Poesía de la Ciudad de México. She runs the poetry press Luna Parque Edições and lives in São Paulo.