The vertebrate sound

Edimilson de Almeida Pereira debuts at José Olympio with a book of poems dedicated to his friend Milton Nascimento, who turns 80.

One year after winning the São Paulo Prize and the Oceanos Prize, with different books and within a fifteen-day period, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, one of the most renowned contemporary writers, debuts at Editora José Olympio with *The Vertebrate Sound *. Organized into four parts—"Map in Collapse," "The Vertebrate Sound," "Excavations," and " Porte Étoile "—the book presents forty-five previously unpublished poems that engage with natural, human, mechanical, and spiritual forces.

These pages reveal songs from over four hundred years of excavation work in the lands of Minas Gerais. The echoes of this craft are still imprinted in the terrain, animals, buildings, and people; and are presented here in the words of award-winning writer Edimilson de Almeida Pereira.

As Evando Nascimento points out in the book's blurb, "This is a different , distinctive experience from a Latin American poet, whose textuality draws on both Western and non-Western matrices, breaking with imaginary geographical boundaries. [...] It is a poetry that ceaselessly passes from the individual to the collective, and vice versa. Thus, an extremely sensitive intelligence emerges, uniting humans, minerals, plants, and animals, sometimes in the same pain. [...] Dedicated to our greatest troubadour, Milton Nascimento, *O som vertebrado* asserts itself as a Babel-like cosmopolitics, with signs disseminated in defense of life in the most varied forms."