“Reading Sam’s poems is a little like falling down a magic rabbit hole: the world you thought you knew gets rearranged and what you’re likely to encounter is “pain or the funniest thing in America,” often both in the same moment. Sam has a certain dead-pan way of inventing stories in a lingo that makes them all the more remarkable. He’s an original.”
—Peter Everwine
“When I think of languages combining like blood and milk, resulting in surprising lyric changes across someone’s poetry, I think of Sam Pereira’s work and a rural background of Portuguese fishermen. He moves from the female oratory to a punk idiom as skillfully as anyone half his age just now beginning to write poems. There is a shyness in Pereira’s work that insists on invented lives that arrive in the morning, a heavy deliberate and as flabbergasted as the rising sun.”
—Norman Dubie
“I’ve been an admirer of Sam Pereira’s poetry for thirty years now, marvelling constantly at his intelligence and humor, his bravado and high style. Sam Pereira’s poems are often both disarming and alarming, or perhaps, first alarming, and then tenderly disarming. There is a fantastic American swagger to these poems, part John Berryman and part Richard Hugo, part Hemingway and part film director David Lynch (if you don’t understand what I mean, check out “Cat Galaxies”). The hyper-real intensity is mediated by the irreal, or the surreal, as public histories and private histories collide and send showers of sparks across the page of every poem.”
—David St. John
