My House is a Mansion is a spiritual and sexual coming of age story explores issues of personal and collective identity, mythical and mystical understandings of self, world and universe, gender, race and class. Amélia, the protagonist, embarks on a quest of self-discovery, travelling between continents in real and symbolic terms finding personal growth and enlightened awakening in the process. The novel abounds in transcultural references, poetic lyrical prose, ecstatic visions, and profound philosophical investigations on what it means to be a woman (and a person), creating an emotionally powerful journey of self-exploration.

Reviews/Blurbs

“My House is a Mansion is a daring, poetic novel ‘in different tongues.’ The protagonist, Amélia, leaves her Portuguese village to travel the world and in each new place finds a lover and has wild, ecstatic dreams, full of bodily delights, bursting with feats of terrifying and awesome reproduction, and brimming with the disturbing proximities of primal desire and looming violence. But for Amélia, travel also carries with it the mighty nautical past of her Iberian homeland, where the pure desire to experience foreign lands is also smeared in the blood of empire like the mattress of her first lover’s bed. We have ‘to face many monsters, who not unlike Adamastor, were hiding under the water and trying to lure [us] to the bottom of their lives,’ but, in the end, we return home as we must, wet and exhausted but with a few more of the missing links connected.” — Carlo Matos, author of The Secret Correspondence of Loon & Fiasco and We Prefer the Damned.

“My House is a Mansion is a moving portrayal of life which takes root in the intimate quests of Amélia, the protagonist, and is packed with insights that transcend time and space. Her travels intersect in ways that carry her through an emotional performance fusing themes of restlessness, moral stances, identity construction, memory, social and cultural positionings and the search for meaning. The complexity of this girl’s soul is explored with a rich and colorful imagination. In a beautifully crafted prose, Irene Marques’s novel keeps the reader enthralled with the superbly deft story of a girl of Portuguese descent.” — Professor Irene Maria F. Blayer, Brock University

Habitando na Metáfora do Tempo 

Sample

“Chamo-me Lúcia. Lúcia Lucrécia. Do Carmo. Pereira. Dos Santos. Lúcia Lucrécia do Carmo Pereira dos Santos. Nome longo e de história. Como bica de água que leva ao Parque Mayer onde abundarão rosas de adro. Abertas à flor de Deus, ao pão dos famintos. À alma das borboletas. À passagem secreta do vento que leva e traz mensagens das mourarias e das sagas de amores violentos, roubados à sombra da noite e conquistados das mãos dos inimigos que nos invadiram a terra, durante séculos e séculos, anunciando outras preces e catedrais. Estou a fugir da minha história, mas nem tanto, é que sempre é preciso prelúdio para adoçar a fruta verde ou seca que vem depois, desvendada no meio da vida e contada com as metáforas que se pode. Que nos chegam em dias cansados e já tão distantes da ideia que tínhamos quando éramos novas e andantes na plena seiva da vida, caminhando com passos decididos porque a verdade seria encontrada no fundo da linha – depois da última passada.” — Lamento de uma mulher infértil

Praise/Reviews

“Literature can certainly have a sex and it always has a gender, even if if in the case of Habitando na metáfora do tempo the gender is indeterminate. Textuality is revealed through the eroticism of language, a language that can be seen under the angle of poetry, or poetic chronicle, or philosophical poetry, or even as poetic-prosaic philosophizing, bringing doubt to the textual matrix. Literature then becomes equivalent to the “primal orgasm” […] where we detect the “Fall of the Angel” due to sin, a pressed down Catholicism returning eternally in this writing […] creating a space for a symbolic Salome…” — Professor Pires Laranjeira, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal (translated by Irene Marques)

When a young woman is subjected to a violent attack, the impact of colonialism, patriarchy, and who we choose to love are thrown into sharp relief. Daria is an immigrant woman living in Toronto, and as she begins to tell her story, the reader is pulled into different worlds, travelling to various timeframes and locations in an unending awe-inspiring Matryoshka play, where one story leads to another and another and another. The novel explores the stories of multiple characters—the Indo-Portuguese-Canadian sexual predator; the idealist and resilient Mozambican freedom fighter; the wondrous Iberian Roma circus; the Christianized Muslims and Jews; the mystical Nubian master who knows how to capture black matter; the fascist dictator whose ruthless cousin delivers unthinkable punishments inside the closed walls of Tarrafal, the infamous Cape Verdean prison of the Portuguese colonial regime—and countless other personalities, some wretched, some redeemable, some otherworldly, who defend visions and ideals and fight for dignity, power, and recognition.

Moving back and forth between Canada, Portugal, Mozambique, and Cape Verde, Daria is a magical realism historical novel where fact and fiction intermingle to create a spellbinding world of complex political, familial, and cultural dynamics.

Blurbs/Reviews

“Brilliant and captivating, the novel Daria provides a look into the struggles and triumphs of being in a new land. Irene Marques’ writing moves extraordinarily between countries and she masterfully creates scenes of beauty and horror, happiness and sadness and, above all, hope and resilience. Books like this offer the world and invite us to experience other lives. This moving tale of dreams and healing will leave you yearning for the journey to continue long after the last word.”
— Sonia Saikaley, author of The Allspice Bath and A Pink Samurai’s House

“Irene Marques is a brilliant novelist and storyteller. She is endowed with the gift of creating characters and narrating their stories over time and space. Daria is a cerebral novel about Portuguese identity, family, immigration, displacement, and remembering. Personal and poetic, Irene Marques’ aching narrative is a masterpiece of contemporary Portuguese-Canadian fiction, a meditation on human experience in Portugal, Canada, and the former Portuguese colonial empire. It is a necessary book for anyone interested in women’s struggles within and outside of patriarchy, dictatorship, colonialism, anticolonialism, immigration, neoliberalism, and globalization. Daria is a novel that conveys the dreams and the wisdom of those who left home and country.”
— Isabel A. Ferreira Gould, independent scholar

Uma Casa no Mundo tem como pano de fundo uma casa de camponeses da região da Beira Alta: uma casa que sonha em ser mansão e se alastra pelo mundo, ou por vezes fora dele, tentando deslizar no sublime do transcendental, sempre guiada pelo etos de perfeição e realização. Trata-se de um romance que explora acontecimentos históricos específicos decorridos entre os fins do século XIX até depois da Revolução de Abril. Distinguido com o Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro 2019.

Praise for her poetry

"The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit ties the secular rituals of everyday to sacred rites of passage, binding language to love and longing, and to the livelihoods that are Irene Marques’ birthright. These poems bring new and old worlds into dialogue, and poetry into the presence of timeless, generous spirits." — J. Edward Chamberlin, If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? 

“What impresses most in Irene Marques’s first book of poetry (Wearing Glasses of Water), are the expansive situations she creates. Rarely does small abide over large, or unadorned show instead of ornate, for this Portuguese-born Canadian writer revels in abundance and lush coloring. Call this fat poetry, not thin. At its best it reminds me of the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: everything writ large and interconnected.” — ARC: Canada's National Poetry Magazine

The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (Mawenzi House, 2024) is a collection of poetry that reveals an all-consuming yearning: the desire to find a language that can tell the most about our existence. What the poet asks for, works obsessively to tap into, is a native tongue, a vernacular that bypasses the traps of a supposed rationality and objectivity forged in a body-politic consumed by self-interests that reduce our ontological experience. The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet calls for an activation of our primary ways of seeing that perceive spontaneously, without deliberation, which have been subdued by the material beneficiaries of our world and deemed non-intelligent. The poems invite us to re-enter our truly bare bones--our empty, sparkling space--before the codified verb, with its imposed grammar, placed us in a consented incarceration. The poet endeavours to uncover the bare alphabets we must return to--the redeeming letters--where the possibility of rebirth resides, for all and everything that has been annihilated by an unethical rhetoric, a verbosity of lies, engendered through undemocratic paradigms crafted by humans.

““This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee.” — Purdue University Press”

Blurbs/Reviews

"In a disciplinary field still largely dominated by the primacy of area studies, Irene Marques's critical engagement with a range of narratives from across the Lusophone and Anglophone world is refreshingly innovative and represents an important contribution to comparative literary study.Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity will be of special relevance to those working on Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee, as well as to those with an interest in issues of language, postcolonialism, identity, gender studies, and the interplay between the aesthetics of literature and expressions of social and political concern." — David Brookshaw, University of Bristol

"The task of literary criticism at present is to imagine a politics that fits the globe and transcends nations. If it is still too early to achieve that, at least we must put political visions from distant places in dialogue. Irene Marques accomplishes this important task by bringing together four authors from both sides of the Atlantic, both sides of the equator, and both sides of Africa—Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee. The novels she considers are not all explicitly political, but what Marques discovers is that implicit politics are not less political. All the authors Marques considers are white by one measure, but she shows the different meanings of white and the varying potential of white to become other in South Africa, Mozambique, Portugal, and Brazil. Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity has crucial things to say about race and nation, politics, and aesthetics today." —Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto

Sample

“Chin Ce’s poetry is intrinsically animistic and romantic in a manner reminiscent of both William Wordsworth and Léopold S. Senghor, one of the finest African poets of the Négritude movement. […] Ce’s poetry is profoundly beautiful and easy to the eye and to the mind. His language is generally not obscure; it possesses a pristine transparency that aligns itself with the poet’s need to merge with the larger self. And furthermore, because of its foremost levity, it permits the reader to also share in the pleasure of the extra-terrestrial voyage that is the mind of the poet and enjoy, enjoy… As Wordsworth would say himself: “The Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion (259).” Ce’s poetry, like most powerful poetry, is a divine call, a profound yearning for wholeness in a world that has become too acquainted with the smallness of dissected disconnected particles. Ce’s poetry is circular and round like the Moon when it is FULL. It is the revolving call of the wolf, who in his desperate and lonely night calls the ‘lover’ that he has lost and misses dearly. If the characters of Children of Koloko speak the language of loss, confusion and spiritual decadence, the shamanistic speaker of Full Moon utters the language of discoveries, enlightenment and transcendence.”