Ana Luísa Amaral’s critical engagement with tradition, be it Portuguese, European, or American, establishes new parameters for poetry today and brings us new modes of understanding textual and material conditions. I propose some modes of reading her poetry towards a wider understanding of the importance of contemporary poetry for literary theory. Ana Luísa Amaral develops a continuous meta-poetic reflection characterized by an acute and lucid preoccupation with beauty and desire. Often subversive, her poetics is inextricably enmeshed with ethics and hence with a specific form of being political. Ana Luísa Amaral excessively demonstrates the fundamental excess of poetry and shows the importance of poetics and poetry in today’s world. Drawing on a poetics of the fragment, she also refuses any sort of originary or foundational aesthetics. In her work, the poetic is always a return otherwise, an ‘avesso’, or the other side of the mirror of language
