Isabel Sobral Campos, The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation

Breaking the page the page
breaks in undue shattering
the bowl of its fragment is
a resonant beam the breaking
the physical well of internment
the page splitting a child’s con-
finement the blueprint of
mental death the age of a child
fluctuates with the punctuated
raptures of malignant expression
understanding foremost the bub-
bling of cruelty fizzes performs
page chew up internal breaching
point pulverized barkpaper leaf
chomping crushing page crack

The latest from American poet, publisher and translator Isabel Sobral Campos, is The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2025), a title that follows a handful of her prior chapbooks and various translations, as well as the full-length collections Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and How to Make Words of Rubble (Takoma Park MD: Blue Figure Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]. Set in a quartet of numbered sections, at first glance, The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation appears to be structured as an extended, continuous accumulation of phrases, piled and layered atop each other, working through language, recollection and footnotes, gathered along an edgeless lyric. “L’Oréal kids shampoo on growing // piles of books, E. Said, Mayan Letters,” the opening sequence begins, “& Clifford Geertz       I study // the past’s phosphorous signs [.]” Campos’ lyric assemblage responds to and is set between footnotes and quoted material around Portugal’s colonial history, a history that exists as the world’s longest-lived colonial empire, from (as Wikipedia offers) “the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415 to the handover of Macau to China in 1999.” Listen, as she quotes from the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, political organizer, engineer and anti-colonial leader, Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), from “The Facts About Portugal’s African Colonies,” which appeared in Unity & Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral (New York NY: Monthly Review, 1979):

‘Twenty thousand workers from Angola, Mozambique and the Cape Verde Islands work twelve hours a day on the settlers’ farms of San Tomé, in the heart of the equatorial zone. There is forced labour for public works in Guiné, Angola, and Mozambique, but in the later two it extends as well the privately owned companies. Every year 250 000 Angolans are rented out to agricultural, mining and contruction concerns. Every year 400 000 people of Mozambique are subjected to forced labour, 100 000 of whom are exported to the mines of South Africa and the Rhodesias. This trade in forced labour provides one of Portugal’s most stable sources of foreign currency.’  

There is an interesting way that Campos offers the prose and the lyric almost as point and counterpoint, allowing each to bounce off the other, utilizing collage across multiple levels, from quoted material and her own prose and staggered sentences and phrases, offering a collage of response slightly reminiscent of the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my review of her latest here], but far more complex in terms of fragments and structural layerings. Whereas Howe might work prose on one side and then a poem on another, even another section or two as well, within the boundaries of a single collection, Campos provides for dozens of smaller, more compact interactions and responses, providing a deeper conversation between sections, between footnotes, quoted material and her own explorations in response. Through the four extended stretches that connect to form The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation, Campos works to almost move in multiple directions simultaneously, providing less a linearity than an expansiveness across a large narrative and critical surface.

OPTOGRAM 6

A slave ship never docks the empty rips through its sails. It moans without a voice falling into a void it disappears the rogue salience of blood swelling in the rhythm of a disembodied breath inhaling exhaling a whirlpool of wrath but who sees you who gazes on to your gash of form your festered eruptions

A classroom in that space without light
Remnants of hidden truths
A blueprint designed for concealment 

Ensure the children do not learn, do not see it or hear it