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...