Giuseppe Formato

Entre Bruma e Mistérios: Poems of the First Island and Beyond is a bilingual meditation on memory, migration, and belonging. Rooted in the volcanic landscapes of Santa Maria in the Azores and extending across the Atlantic to New England, this collection explores the emotional geography of diaspora through images of stone, wind, salt, and silence.

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The poems inhabit liminal spaces: between island and continent, Portuguese and English, past and present, inheritance and reinvention. They evoke ancestral voices, vernacular landscapes, religious echoes, and the quiet persistence of cultural memory within gentrified streets and immigrant neighborhoods. At once intimate and historical, the collection reflects on language as both refuge and fracture, asking what survives when territory changes but memory does not.

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Through restrained lyricism and sensorial imagery, these poems trace the resilience of an island consciousness shaped by Atlantic crossings, intergenerational transmission, and the fragile durability of place. The “first island” becomes not only a geographical origin but a metaphysical point of return, a site of fog and revelation where identity is continually reassembled.

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This collection invites readers into a poetics of transatlantic belonging, where bruma obscures and reveals, and mystery becomes a mode of survival.