[01/15/26] Ramos, Paulo: Bodies of Water

np:, paperback

Publication Date: January 15, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

“Paulo Ramos has carefully and beautifully woven this book of poetry. Bodies of Water is a gift—a deeply thoughtful and reflective glimpse into the politics of race, gender, sexuality, ancestry, land, and time in our lives in the Americas. Each word echoes in the space-time of our Black experience.” —Christen A. Smith, Yale University

“Paulo Ramos, another Black boy who is a sorcerer, makes his body into water to wash away all the pain of our history.” —Osmundo Pinho, University of the Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil

Bodies of Water is a breath underwater. Bodies of Water is memory in motion, a current carrying the stories of Black women-mothers. It is the description of the poetic pluralities of Black women in their intellectualities as they experience the world, a world born from the relationships and socialities that emerge from these waters. The book Bodies of Water reveals itself through the wisdom of the mother, grandmother, aunt, and neighborhood women (mother-neighbors) of the author, who shared mothering and waters among themselves. It is these women and these waters that make us s(w)im-alk in the Black feeling-doing, rooted in an ancestry that flows from their wombs and hearts.

Paulo Ramos is born from the womb of his mother, Terezinha Ramos de Jesus. He is an Afro-Brazilian visual artist, performer, actor, and poet whose multidisciplinary work spans video, performance, and poetry. His Corpos D’água was published in 2023, and he has performed at the At First Sigh New Works Festival at Indiana University and in venues across São Paulo and Tepoztlán, leading to the videoperformance “Bodies of Water: Three buckets: a river, a mangrow, and a sean.” Ramos holds a Ph.D. in Social Science in Gender and Black Studies from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, and he continues to explore and amplify the narratives of Afro-Brazilian identity.