Irene marques

Praise for Uma Casa no Mundo (Novel) (Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro, Portugal)

“Uma Casa no Mundo [2021] is a novel of solid structure that addresses themes of high significance: learning, memory and a diffused relation with History. In Irene Marques’s novel, the reader is exposed to an important part of Portugal’s History spanning approximately one century of colonial history in Africa and ending with the April Revolution, which led to the abolishment of the Portuguese dictatorship, and ultimately also the independence of the African colonies. Moreover, the novel also exposes the reader to relevant psychological portraits of the Portuguese people as they deal with their own individual reality and external realities that affect their lives. Yet, the whole narrative is presented to us in an involving manner through an eminently human lens where the story, the traits and universe of each character gradually reveal the sociopolitical situation, and ensuing dramas and traumas. We are in the presence of a novel that allows for a historical and social reading of a country, while at the same time providing us with a direct depiction of humans as they engage and deal with war, face physical and psychological misery, and suffer the brutality that arises as men dominate other men. And through all this, we also see at work the power of fraternal and romantic love, and the human desire for fulfillment—universal and intemporal themes. On the other hand, Irene Marques’s narrative style in this novel skillfully ties social realism with the fantastic, giving the text a universal tone and quality, showing any reader that which is essentially human, no matter the latitude we inhabit.” — Jury, Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro

Praise for Daria (Novel)

“Irene Marques’s novel Daria (2021) delves into the complexities of diasporic identity, gender dynamics, and colonial legacies within the Portuguese community in Toronto. Through the narrative lens of Daria, the protagonist, Marques traverses between Portugal, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Toronto, exploring themes of cultural displacement, gender liberation, and the lingering effects of colonialism. Employing modernist narrative techniques reminiscent of William Faulkner, Marques intricately weaves together Daria's introspective monologues with fragments of memory and trauma. The novel sheds light on Daria's quest for autonomy, her confrontations with patriarchal norms inherited from her cultural upbringing, and her experiences of sexual exploitation and resilience within the diaspora. Marques interlaces historical contexts, colonial histories, and personal narratives to offer a compelling exploration of identity, power dynamics, and liberation within the Portuguese diaspora. Through vivid character portrayals and evocative storytelling, Daria invites readers to engage with the complexities of cultural heritage, gender roles, and the pursuit of individual freedom amidst intersecting social and historical landscapes.” — Full review in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese North-American Letters and Studies, No. 48, 2024, (155-163), Brown University. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:rbthzqtj/

“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 Samurai’s Pink 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

“In Daria, Irene Marques paints a sprawling canvas of interconnected narratives whose settings range from present-day Canada to a village in Portugal’s Beira Alta region to colonial-era Mozambique and the Portuguese prison camp in Tarrafal, Cabo Verde. By turns transcendently lyrical and unsparingly brutal, the novel spins together stories within stories, intricately woven dreams, and fantastic visions as it follows its protagonist on her immigrant journey.” — Anna M. Klobucka , Professor of Portuguese and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Praise for My House is a Mansion (Novel)

“My House is a Mansion [Leaping Lion Books/York University, 2015] 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

“My House is a Mansion [Leaping Lion Books/York University, 2015] 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

Praise for The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (Poetry)

"Irene Marques is a master craftsman [woman!] of language, where each word is meticulously sculpted into a poem to stir both emotion and contemplation... Marques’ love for words mirrors her profound understanding that language is the foundation upon which love is built, a force that transcends mere physical desire... As her words gently expand, they invite you to witness their beauty as it unfolds, layer by layer, revealing deeper meanings within their intricate simplicity. Her poetry is not just read but felt, like a quiet revelation spreading across the still waters of the mind....Every word carries the weight of affection, trust, and intimacy, skillfully weaving together the threads of human connection." — Full review here: “The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet by Irene Marques.” In Sandbox World/Pop Culture Entertainment. October 1, 2024. https://sandboxworld.com/the-bare-bones-of-the-alphabet-by-irene-marques/ 

“Marques tackles issues such as poverty, gender, class, capitalism, individualism and even impostor syndrome through ethical communication and powerful language. The necessity for a benign, ethical language runs deep in Marques’ poems where the poetic voice engages with the reader, cautioning and questioning against the traps of modern lifestyle. The language of capitalism that seduces and manipulates our desires is one such trap. Poems like “Broken Down: Make Me Whole” address the harmful influences of social media, the constant need for validation and attention; only through true language, as advocated in “For the Love of Words” can contest our fake world. In other instances, the poetic voice questions centuries old behaviours in particular as these relates to women’s bodies victimized by a male gaze that preys or consumes like “eyes of vulture” as one poem signals. Poems, like “Lucinda” where the woman, sullied by the ills of (male) society, posit the reader to reflect upon the sacred body before exploitation and domination. Ultimately, and perhaps this collection’s most beautiful principle resides in the discussions of love and how true love can only be obtained once we strip down to the bare bones and choose true and ethical language driven by the recognition that we are not gods, but “do have the sacred and fiery power in [us]”. — Full review here: “Words That Matter: The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet by Irene Marques.” In Milénio Stadium Paper, by Maria João Maciel Jorge, Toronto, September 27, 2024. https://mileniostadium.com/local/comunidade/words-that-matter-the-bare-bones-of-our-alphabet-by-irene-marques/

Praise for The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit (Poetry)

“The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit [Mawenzi House, 2012] 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.”  — Professor J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto, If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? 

Praise for Wearing Glasses of Water (Poetry)

“What impresses most in Irene Marques' first book of poetry, Wearing Glasses of Water [Mawenzi House, 2007], 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 colorings. 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. Marques continually welcomes us into her world with poetic leis and figurative dances… The poems knit together with repeated images and words so that the whole assumes a universal feel…Marques has a clear ability to turn a poem and make it her own.”  — Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine

“[The essence of Marques's poetry is a peep into the complex dimensions and psychological states of being, of creativeness and inventiveness with the Word, of themes and motifs of libidinal drives or instincts, of internal emotional conflicts where individual impulses and needs must be placed in ethical resolution with social or moral obligations.  [With] Irene Marques and Wearing Glasses of Water [Mawenzi House, 2007], the world is consequently geared for renewal, the universe set to expand in its revolving and perpetuating order - an order that needs must leave behind for all humanity a glow of transformation. Thenceforth we can strive in wearing our teardrops, ("glasses of water") knowing that life deals these experiences to us in an effort to imbue meaning and purpose to terrestrial existence, which also means—as some of our own poets would hint—our filling the higher ethics to the craft and aesthetes of our various creative calling.” — African Journal of New Poetry

Praise for Habitando na metáfora do tempo: crónicas desejadas (collection of chronicles in Portuguese)

“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)

Praise for Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity 

"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 [Purdue University Press, 2011] has crucial things to say about race and nation, politics, and aesthetics today." — Professor Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto

"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 [Purdue University Press, 2011]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." — Professor David Brookshaw, University of Bristol