A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira (River River Books, 2024). 89 pages. $18
by Tom Snarsky
When I was a high school teacher, I always shared one poem with my classes at the beginning of the year: “A Journey” by Nikki Giovanni. I didn’t give my students much context beforehand, we just jumped into the poem’s opening: “It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .” I thought of this poem immediately when I saw the titles in Carla Sofia Ferreira’s A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us that mention students (e.g. “Today My Students Tell Me,” an all-time favorite from the collection re: which more later), or even poems dedicated to them (“In This Poem, Bert & Ernie Are Gay”).
It is, paradoxically, both hard and delicate to be a teacher while also being Giovanni’s “fellow passenger”—when you teach youth in secondary + postsecondary contexts, as Ferreira has and does, you bring your own identity into a room where many others are actively being formed, including by what you say and do. In her article “Invisible Identities,” educator Erin Smith wrestles with the question of how much of her own journey, specifically surrounding mental health, to share with her students: “When I first began teaching, I didn’t divulge anything about my own mental health journey to students. For one, I thought that might delegitimize me as a teacher somehow, even if I was speaking in past tense. I also thought, frankly, that I would scare them.” Ultimately, Smith decides to share parts of her past experience with her students, partially in the hopes of connecting with them when they might feel at their most alone and partially because, “at the end of the day, I am only the teacher I am because of my past, however painful. I want my students to know that I have lived and struggled not for them, but alongside them” (emphasis mine). Even in the face of a hyper-politicized educational climate, which has placed more scrutiny than ever on what teachers say and do, Ferreira’s book unapologetically presents the poet-teacher as a vibrant, several-dimensional, multilingual singer of the many sorrows and joys of life, and in particular of the education it has in store for all of us. The book is a record of many different ways to make sense of the world in verse, and dazzles as much for its pluralism as for the emotional, formal, and imagistic precision of its poems.
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There are many pieces from the book I could quote at length, but I’d love to spend time with my personal favorite, “Today My Students Tell Me”—in particular, this section:
[...] a student tells me that I seem
like the kind of person who is good at tending plants,
that I seem exactly like someone who would care for
dying plants and maybe even heal them, only I am the one
adding maybe, because they said it with such conviction
and another student agreed with them like this was simple
and true, and I laughed, I told them they were wrong, that I wish
I were more like my grandmother, who was in fact a tender of gardens
and all green things [...]
The first time I read this poem I was drawn to its subtle music: the way it dips into iambs for “is good at tending plants” feels like a perfect sonic parallel for the rhythms of care that phrase postulates, and there are little consonant breadcrumbs that reinforce the different connections between the poem’s characters and concepts/images (“person” and “plants,” “care” and “conviction,” “grandmother” and “garden” and “green”). Ferreira’s poems have a very intimate connection to music, which we’ll unpack a little more in the next section.
Like all great poems, this one has more to reveal than what the ear picks up alone. First is the airy line break on “care for,” which points gently at the fact that even though the object coming in the next line is “dying plants,” the student here sees Ferreira’s speaker as a carer writ large: this speaker clearly cares enough for their students to invite these kinds of ribbing-yet-kind characterizations and comparisons from them. And it is, indeed, them, in both the singular and plural: the line break on “only I am the one / adding maybe” plays with the irony that Ferreira’s speaker’s self-doubt is individual, while the students’ positive assessments are coming from the collective (and with certainty: “they said it with such conviction / and another student agreed with them like this was simple / and true”). This is also a playful inversion of the kind of building-up that is so often the bread and butter of the student-teacher relationship: anyone who has taught adolescents has had at least a hundred versions of the conversation where you not so much convince a student that they can do something, as you reassert it insistently (and necessarily simply, like a fully self-evident fact) until you both believe it.
So much of good teaching happens along the melodic lines of community and conversation that the reader hears in this episode, and there is also a bittersweet note that sounds across the enjambment of “simple / and true.” The reader is reminded that a majority of what students and teachers encounter outside of the context of a classroom community will be neither simple nor true: although Ferreira’s speaker cannot protect their students from this reality, they can share space with them and even bits of their own life story, like the moment with which this episode concludes, when the speaker invokes their grandmother. I love this moment of the poem so dearly because it once again inverts a classic discursive move of the classroom teacher, who can ask a student a question (or offer a small conjecture based on a little bit of data, new haircut, new shoes, how’d the game go yesterday, etc.) and then, by the happy accident of how the student responds, the teacher ends up learning something about the student’s life or their family or their interests—adding a vital shade of humanity to the student/teacher relationship. This moment in Ferreira’s poem shows how this dialectic is fundamentally a two-way street, colored in on both sides of the dividing line by student and teacher alike deciding to share.
In particular, Ferreira’s speaker chooses to tell the students about their grandmother, “a tender of gardens / and all green things.” There is a lovely visual parallel between the line-ending phrases “tending plants” and “tender of gardens,” the former a description of the speaker offered by the students and the latter a description of the speaker’s grandmother offered by the speaker. This extends the building-up beyond the classroom walls and across generational lines in a way that connects the poem up with one of Geography’s grandest motifs: temporal and familial cycles of care. A double meaning of “green,” both in the literal sense of plant color and in the more figurative sense of being new, even naïve, invites us to consider that we all exist at varying stages of vulnerability and imperfection along this timeless continuum of care: just as wisdom passes across generations, and is remembered, youth gives the energy of its indomitable spirit back to teachers and grandparents, with a side of cheek. This back-and-forth ouroboros prepares us beautifully for the poem’s ending: “this tenderness, even just this shared / nodding of heads, that it takes care of me every day, that it keeps me like a garden.”
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In the foregoing, we have settled into Ferreira’s Geography in one of very, very many ways a reader could enter the text. Teaching high school students is my own personal gateway, but the book teems with further possibilities: in addition to being a book of the teaching and learning that occurs in classrooms and across generations, it is also a collection about ecology and cultivation on a local and global scale: “I am wondering / if I can hold it all like this packet of seeds and also if the earth / here will let them grow” (“In This Garden I Am Growing”). It is no less, too, a collection of love poems, the addressees and objects of which span family, history, and the many different kinds of intimacies that make up a life: “In my thoughts, I call you Grandma / though I never called you that in life. / I keep forgetting what it means to live a life / with you not in it” (“Poem In Which I Can Say Polka Dots, Tenderness, Icicles Without Translation,” one of the other poems in the collection that directly and poignantly addresses “Avó,” the speaker’s grandmother). Furthermore, the book is a compendium of form and of the joys of spoken and written language as only an English teacher can communicate them, made up as it is of poems working across forms (odes, elegies, centones, ghazals, letters, self-portraits, even a ransom note!) and singing the praises of punctuation (one poem opens with the indelible phrase “Plums she gathers like ampersands,” and there is even a poem called “Ode to the Semicolon”!).
Finally, Geography is a carefully crafted parallax along two different, but coincident, cultural lines: Fado, a venerable Portuguese musical tradition encompassing songs of longing and melancholy (which often take as their subject matter life at sea and the struggles of the poor), and The Ironbound, a working-class neighborhood in Newark with a strong Portuguese immigrant community. Ferreira’s first micro-chapbook is entitled Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press, 2019), and some of the poems included both there and in Geography enact Fado’s complex relationship with sorrow, grief, and love on the subjects of an Ironbound upbringing: family, local flora, even “The playground of concrete and gravel and parking spaces” at St. Lucy’s (a Catholic Church in Newark that is host to the American national shrine for St. Gerard Majella, an Italian saint who grew up in poverty, worked several jobs, and would go on to become the patron saint of expectant mothers). Everywhere in Ferreira’s collection, even on the periphery, there is this intermingling of the work of poetry with the spirit of joy, of wisdom that passes through generations and creates the maps by which we know ourselves, our neighborhoods, and our beloveds. (One of my favorite things about the book is that the Acknowledgements section runs to six pages, in order better to contain “an incomplete catalogue of gratitude,” a riff on Ross Gay that ends the book as warmly and openly as it began.)
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At the end of the year, I’d share one more poem with my students: “Homeless Heart” by John Ashbery. “When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy.” A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us is imbued to its marrow with this feeling, the joy of a collective work and emergent togetherness, tinged by the sadness essential to song: “I am tired of living alone. I am growing a garden / like my life depends on it because it does” (“In This Garden I Am Growing,” that “depends on” one of the book’s winks to fellow NJ poet William Carlos Williams). This joy shines with the same brightness as a graduating class, while still pulling little threads out of the hearts of educators and family members who can feel the way the passage of time will quickly turn this joy into memory. When I read Carla Sofia Ferreira’s luminous collection I am reminded of two things: first, of the students I had who were bilingual in Portuguese and English, for whom this book would be an unequivocal affirmation that their language and experience is the language and experience of poetry. Second, that time and our transition across generations and from one cohort of students to the next does not have to be all grief, or only grief: that I am instead free to follow Ferreira’s example in order to describe my finitude differently, “to love afternoons turned into morning, and / to love with both hands and eyes closed what is already leaving me.”
Tom Snarsky is a former high school math teacher and the author of the full-length poetry collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in summer 2025, and his book MOUNTEBANK is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in spring 2026. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats.
Moist Poetry Journal 