Stepping into the poetic world of Millicent Borges Accardi

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American poet, is the author of four poetry collections: Quarantine Highway, Through a Grainy Landscape, Injuring Eternity, and Only More So.

Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.”

Millicent holds degrees in English and writing from CSULB and the University of Southern California.

Millicent Borges Accardi is truly a jewel in the Portuguese-American cultural scene. She has contributed immensely with her work as a poet, a cultural activist in programs such as Kale Soup for the Soul, and her insightful interviews for the Portuguese-American Journal.

Her book Though a Grainy Landscape is a tour de force into the Portuguese-American world. All of her poetry has influences from her ancestral ties to the Azores and the Portuguese-American experience in the United States.

Here are a few quotes praising her book Though a Grainy Landscape

At times lovely in its specificity, and others penetrating in its clarity, Through a Grainy Landscape opens a new lens on the generational impact of immigration and on the absences so many of us feel in our lives, but perhaps don’t turn our eyes toward. Millicent Borges Accardi is unflinching in her approach to the beauties of her world and the contradictions of her life experiences. The objects and abstractions she focuses her gaze upon become something new and alive. Through a Grainy Landscape will take you on a journey through the world you know and offer you many ways to reconsider it.

Lisa Higgs–https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/through-a-grainy-landscape/

This collection of poems is as lush and volcanic as the Azorean landscape, grounded in earthiness, rich with the yearning for the sea, and seasoned with saudade.

–PaulA Neves -Portuguese-American poet

A vital book for those of us whose heritage is Portuguese, but it’s also an important book for American readers of every background and tradition. It stands as an esthetic bridge between cultures.

–Frank X. Gaspar – Portuguese American poet

Here are just a few quotes praising her latest book, Quarantine Highway

A collection that should be savoured on dark nights of the soul

–A.R.Salandy at Full House Literary

Amid a global pandemic, the ceaseless wildfires of California, a political landscape of turmoil, Millicent Borges Accardi offers us a powerful collection of self-reckoning. —Ángel García

This engaging, provocative tome importantly contributes to a rich and meaningful legacy in literature of resilience, in discourse with the Fates at heart, demonstrating the continued relevance of the eternal struggle between humanity and nature, may be situated on a shelf for posterity between Thomas Mann and Albert Camus, Gabriel García Márquez and Sylvia Plath. —Valley Voices 23.1 / 126

It’s a manifesto of her survival and her identity in response to the pandemic, and its existence will demonstrate how to be led back to a place of safety.

Alex Carrigan — Drizzle Review

Like breaking bread and memorizing trees, Accardi’s poems step past comets that blast loneliness and cracks in the sidewalk from our childhood in order to help us rediscover all the connections we’ve missed. —Juan J. Morales

Poems:

Portrait of a Young Girl, 1942

Based on the Jan Lukas photograph of Vendulka Vogelova, taken a few hours before the young girl was transported to a concentration camp.

I am the mirror for one who speaks;

these fresh gaps are wind in the linden trees,

cotton flowers of life. A mirror is not much

for all of us, but if we listen for reflection,

the clear twin face of a groan behind the looking

glass, we hear the cat’s hair sounds of all people

grumbling in the same manner about the air

the food the earth the sidewalk.

I am the mirror for all the world’s silence,

and the ones who slipped through without drawing

blood, whose suicides number nothing next

to vast doors too tall to reach heaven, locked

forever, whose breaking takes generations,

sometimes, dull copper paint on the back of a lake.

I am the mirror for one who is trembling

like a child who has noticed too much, eyes

hard olive pits. I think about how life

cracks when the vanity glass overturns

our hands. Sharp pints in bars. Uneven edges

of ale. Crisp indignities of foam.

I am the mirror for all who choose

not to speak. I crack

in the dark. I shine in the snow.

Westerly Centre for Studies in Literature, Special Issue: War-Time Voices

Let the Wickedness of the Wicked

Come to us like a child looking for a way
Home, let the gullibility and narcissism
Lie flat inside us as if we were the lost
Generation in search a direct, unadorned
Sentence, a minute of skill that we both
Know is the opposite of trust. It is anguish
We know but barely understand or interpret
As elation. We sit in a dive, on Abbot Kinney
Before the elites took over and stopped the
Gangs and shootings, ferreting out the bad
Elements as they are called with another term
Named gentrification. It is with elation we
Are matched up and optimistic in this
Frame we steal, right before adult life
Is supposed to begin, before we stop
Being on holiday, drinking mint tea,
A gang of wayward writers, getting
Into other people’s business without
Knowing why. We laugh because
The stop watch has not tripped yet.
Because hunger allows us no choice,
Because failing to meet expectations is not a crime.
Moving from one point to another, we all know
We are not being as good as people say
We are. A pack of fools spending pocket money
And hours foolishly. For a brief moment,
We dismiss how things are going only to
Push aside our attempts to scatter and examine
Until later. Fall days are uneven and sparse.
We discuss and enforce our crime-imagined belief
System, at an age when anything is still possible.