No Gods Live Here: Poems

WINNER OF THE 2021 WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS--ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS POEMS IN TRANSLATION CONTEST

No Gods Live Here, the first book-length collection by a woman from São Tomé to appear in English, is grounded in the lush islands’ history of slavery, colonialism, and independence.

A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country’s past alongside the poet’s own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation’s distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place.

Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.

Conceição Lima was born in 1961 in Santana, on the island of São Tomé, São Tomé and Príncipe, in the Gulf of Guinea. Journalist, poet and chronicler, she was among the founders of the National Union of Writers and Artists, UNEAS, inspired by Alda Espírito Santo, poet and a fundamental nationalist and literary reference. She worked extensively as a journalist and producer for the Portuguese Service of the BBC. Lima currently lives in São Tomé, where she is a journalist for TVS, the State Television. She is the author of multiple poetry collections and her work has been translated into German, Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Galician, Turkish, Czech and Serbian-Croatian. Poems of hers have been published in English translation by the Poetry Translation Centre, The Literary Review, World Literature Today, and Words Without Borders. Her poem ＂Afroinsularity,＂ translated by Shook, was awarded Winner of the 2021 Words Without Borders--Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.

Shook is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, and editor. Their debut collection Our Obsidian Tongues was longlisted for the 2013 International Dylan Thomas Prize; poems from that book have been translated into Arabic, French, Isthmus Zapotec, Kurmanji, Japanese, Mandarin, Sorani, Spanish, Swedish, and Uyghur. The book was adapted into a short film in Rwanda, and published in Chile as Lenguas de obsidiana in late 2019. In 2013 Shook founded nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, which has since published over thirty books translated from twenty-six different languages, including the first ever literary translations from languages like Lingala and Uyghur. Shook has translated over fourteen books from Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, including work by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, and Víctor Terán.