Over the space of centuries, the exploration and settlement of Brazil inspired a vast body of stories that sought to define the country. Its people, its landscapes and its history became the focus of an intense gaze that transmuted the image of Brazil into a fantasy landscape, a changeling world of mingled beauty and brutality, by turns quaint, hallucinatory and nightmarish.

Cabra is an exploration of the imagination of Brazil and it's the fever-dream. It is a mapping of the topography of myth itself, a search for the voice of history in the cracks of the colonial facade. Perhaps most of all, it is a search for the voices of the dispossessed, whose very identity is the tortured space of the middle passage, the in-between.

Ian Samuels is a former editor of filling Station magazine and currently works at WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival. He is the author of one previous collection of poetry titled Cabra (Red Deer Press, 2000). He lives in his hometown of Calgary, where he is currently working on a mythic history of once-famous blues venue the King Edward Hotel.

Ian Samuels' profile page

"Cabra challenges readers to ponder Samuel's views on Brazil as creation of the imagination that helps us to discover ourselves."
— Canadian Book Review Annual