Karinna Alves Gulias

She was co-founder of the Confraria do Vento publishing house and made her debut in 2006 in the poetry journal Confraria, with nine poems published under the collective title ‘sem cores, o infinito seria água’ (without colours infinitude would be water). Since then her poetry publications have been few and far between, yet even though she withdrew from the Brazilian literary scene in 2009 she is still recognized as an interesting discovery of recent times.
 
Indeed, some of her work was included in the anthology of contemporary Brazilian Poetry XXI poetas de hoje em dia(nte) (2009, XXI poets from today onwards) and in the special edition of Action poétique (no. 204, June 2011) devoted to young Brazilian poets. Her first and so far only collection, Maria da Graça, terra dos nomes perdidos (Maria da Graça, land of the lost names), appeared in 2011. From time to time in recent years she has published new poems on her  blog, but only in English, which does not mean to say that she will not at some point return to her mother tongue.
 
Her first collection constitutes a carefully compiled narrative cycle about a suburb of Rio de Janeiro in which man and nature take on mythical proportions in what resembles an alternative version of the story of creation. Maria da Graça, the Son and the Father reinforce the Biblical aspect whilst the setting remains very recognizably Brazilian and is somehow reminiscent of the very worldly epic of the cineast Glauber Rocha and the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. In a lapidary fashion Karinna Gulias creates an elementary human world, which, just like her English poems (a collection of which is in preparation), is carried along by the concentrated power of words, sounds and images. Bibliography

Maria da Graça, terra dos nomes perdidos, Multifoco, Rio de Janeiro, 2011
XXI poetas de hoje em dia(nte), Letras Contemporâneas, 2009
Action poétique 204 (June 2011)
Zunái – Revista de poesia & debates (2008)
Confraria 10 (Sept./Oct. 2006)