PREORDER: Itinerant Songs by Terra Oliveira
For those of us that work and are weighed down, Terra Oliveira’s Itinerant Songs is a yearning for home—for safe, affordable shelter, clean, commonly-held water, and the rights to our own land and being amongst our people. Through low-wage jobs, the “hard-facts of devotion,” and pilgrimage and recovery, these poems are a politically urgent testament to our times as much as they are a lasting, spiritual attestation.
"I felt such power reading this book. The poems keep strumming the big 'we'—we who tend the earth, who work underpaid jobs, who live in moldy homes and breathe in wildfire smoke. These populist prayers hum with aliveness. Here is the world so frankly recorded that it feels new."
— Lora Mathis, author of The Snakes Came Back (Metatron Press)
"What we need for the times ahead are words, language, an articulation of all the unseen and unsaid things—and Terra Oliveira's Itinerant Songs is exactly this. This book provokes by stating the truth and encouraging conviction through annunciation—'honesty is the warmest blanket,' Oliveira reminds us. These words connect us and they buoy us towards the future."
— Fariha Róisín, author of Survival Takes a Wild Imagination (Andrews McMeel)
“Itinerant Songs is a prayer, a protest, and an outstretched hand rooted in solidarity. Through poems that move across cities, histories, and homelands, Terra Oliveira traces the contours of labor, belonging, grief, and spiritual longing with a voice that is both precise and tender. This collection honors the political in the personal and the everyday acts of resistance that keep us connected to each other and the earth. Oliveira writes toward a world where care is not a luxury—where housing, healthcare, water, and rest are rights, not privileges, and where the act of noticing becomes a necessary form of defiance. These pages hold reverence for those who came before, care for those living through the now, and a steady hope for the future we must all work to build together.”
— Sam Slupski, author of Until Tender (Game Over Books)
Terra Oliveira is a writer, visual artist, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. A finalist in the 2024 Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, The Common, Puerto del Sol, Protean Magazine, and more. Her poetry and illustration collection, An Old Blue Light, won the Where Are You Press Poetry Contest in 2016, and she has been awarded international residencies at The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu at the Great Wall of China, and elsewhere. Born and raised throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, she is of Azorean-Portuguese, Native Hawaiian, Chinese, and mixed Eurasian descent. Her work is an extension of her core practices and beliefs: in recovery, community, pilgrimage and retreat, and peoples' movements globally.
Poetry and design by Terra Oliveira
Cover art: Protest Angel by Tabitha Arnold
82 pages. Black and white.
ISBN: 979-8-218-64593-9
Preorder: April 22nd, 2025.
Release Date: July 15th, 2025.