Cactus Flowers

2026 shortlist for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and a Golden Crown Literary Award

Samantha Pious's translations from the Portuguese of Judith Teixeira's poetry in Cactus Flowers resound with sensual energy and burning tenderness. Reading these poems, one is struck not only with the passion of Teixeira's queer love poems but by the way in which turbulent politics and social tensions are subtly traceable within the lines. Translations such as this renew literature across multiple languages; Pious is asking us not only to reconsider Teixeira's place within the canon but to reconsider what makes the canon itself: whose stories are valid, which loves are counted, whose language is considered inventive or new. Pious translates Teixeira's synesthetic rapture for English language readers who might be out of practice with such unconstrained earnestness, reminding us that pleasure does have the possibility of obliterating the pain it passes through. What excites me perhaps most about this collection, however, is its ability to transgress any notion of a quiet reading experience. The lone reader is thrown into the bodily world, reminding us that words first and foremost are of the body and its unique experiences.

-Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Judith Teixeira's poetry has almost always, over the decades, discomfited specialists, whether because she was a woman writer whose style (Symbolist-Decadent, saudosista, and modernist) was used by the masculine canon of her day, or because her own amorous discourse manifests, at times, a lesbian desire characteristic of the poetic of the boudoir. Her verses disquiet, fascinate, and give rise to heated discussions, as often in her defense as in the condemnation of her work. Above all, she translated the clashes of the Roaring Twenties and fought for the right to liberty and artistic expression.

This English edition-with a selection and preface by Samantha Pious, wherein I would underline the sensitivity and care of her fine translations, as well as her personal commitment-allows Anglophone readers to connect with the first Portuguese woman writer to sing of lesbian love, transforming women's bodies into objects of worship and of carnal consummation.

We celebrate this edition, then, with the words Judith Teixeira wrote in 1922 in her poem "Free," which return to life, reinvented, in 2025: "today, my desire intensifies / for what other hours might bring."

-Fabio Mario da Silva