In Code Blue: New and Selected Poems, Sam Pereira writes as though every poem were composed at the edge of weather, memory, and reckoning. These are poems steeped in the smoke of diners and late-night bars, in the scent of juniper, whiskey, saltwater, wet wool, and old Catholic prayers whispered somewhere between California and the Azores. Pereira’s voice is unmistakably his own—ferocious and tender, streetwise and metaphysical, capable of moving from the rough music of boxing gyms and neon-lit boulevards to moments of devastating human intimacy. In these pages, love dances with grief, politics with longing, jazz with prayer, and the ordinary becomes charged with almost biblical consequence. Few contemporary poets write with such bruised elegance, such moral clarity, or such astonishing emotional risk.

Spanning decades of work, this collection reveals a poet who has transformed exile, inheritance, desire, humor, aging, and cultural memory into a singular American lyric vision. Pereira’s poems inhabit motels, dairy towns, cafés, hospital corridors, train stations, and rain-darkened streets with the same gravity other poets reserve for cathedrals. Here, the Portuguese-American experience is neither sentimentalized nor reduced to folklore; it becomes a living and restless geography of language, labor, music, and survival. Code Blue: New and Selected Poems is a book of hard-earned wisdom and luminous ache, a collection that understands poetry not as ornament, but as witness—an act of keeping faith with memory while the world rushes toward forgetting. These poems linger as fado heard through fog, like cigarette smoke under streetlights, like the final warmth of a hand before winter closes around it.

Sam will be reading from his new book published by Bruma Publications at Fesno State this Saturday, October 17.