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

 

Imani Elizabeth Jackson, FLAG

 

And what of flags? I refuse the immediate meaning. I wrestle the word down to the ground and find life seeping up. Wild iris, march herb calamus, fabric signal, the tail of some dogs, the tail of some deer, something rippling or wagging, object for attraction, stone suitable for pavement, to lay such stones, they say it’s for allegiance, my aunt thinks skin, I’m looking to a porous and fluid border, where the boundary cracks and green pours through, herb to mouth, to quilt to stone, water tucking into the bends, all this motion fills in! to flag or hang loose, to tire, decline, to hail, raise a concern, lost steadiness, oh love, greening earth, to mark for remembrance and return.

The first full-length collection by American poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, following the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020) as well as the co-authored (as mouthfeel) Consider the tongue with S*an D. Henry-Smith (Paper Machine, 2019), is FLAG (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), a striking collection of prose lyric that writes on boundaries, borders and history, elements that read a bit more charged during the current geopolitical climate. “Sometimes there are no words or / the words simply are not the right / ones.” she writes, as part of the opening section. “Or sometimes the words don’t / match, or they jumble. It’s okay, it’s / alright, it’s all flow. Flow, flow, flow.”

Set in six sections—“Untitled,” “Land mouth,” “The Black Bettys,” “One wild blue day,” “Flag” and “Slow coups”—each section rides an unfolding, an unfurling, of accumulations set as individual prose blocks, allowing the music of these lyric narratives a kind of propulsion. As she offers as part of the first section: “It bears repeating that Toni Morrison / said all water has a perfect memory / and is forever trying to get back / to where it was. Writers are like / that: remembering where we were, / what valley we ran through, what / the banks were like, the light that / was there and the route back to / our original place.” She writes of history, slavery and arrival, and the ongoing impacts of that history, little of which has been properly acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators. “Certain facts stand.” Or, further on: “Some of us can be traced by how we / arrived—which way up or down. Some / of us don’t remember. Simply can’t.”

Moving from American border space through “Louisiana and Mississippi,” south to Guyana and the “Meeting of Waters in Brazil,” Jackson’s text is lively, powerful and performative; bearing an incredible weight with a music and craft that provides such a quality of light. I would suspect such a collection equally comfortable on the stage as it is on the page, and an adaptation for the theatre wouldn’t be impossible to imagine. Composed through an array of short narrative bursts that string and sing together to form something greater, Jackson’s FLAG articulates a conversation around borders and depictions, notions of country and self-description, and how often that narrative contradicts, and so often at the expense of the very populace they claim to protect. FLAG weaves a variety of histories, music and story, providing an incredible collage-effect of fierce intensity. This is a remarkable book.

Clear Rock’s recording ambles at a slow pace, slower than Leadbelly’s,
slower than the version of it popularized by the late-1970s band Ram
Jam, whose rendition made them a one hit wonder. Was it slow work
Clear Rock did on the chain gang—lifting the axe, swinging the axe,
felling the trees—despite the rush of the whip. (“The Black Bettys”)

Tilghman A. Goldsborough, Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, )

 

2B honest [4 once] i’m still kinda fucked up
from when The Ground moved ..

, it’s hard 2 deal directly && forcefully w/ pressing issues
when there’s so much going on w/o+w/in
&& i don’t kno
where 2 begin .
like , idk if i ever told u
that My Greatest Fear is falling
from a great height..
i don’t think it’s (re:) hitting
The Ground tho; it’s maybe more
fear of the Panic! ,, of the absolute lack
of control as a foregone conclusion rushes
up 2 meet U,,

I’m absolutely floored by the cluster, clash and careening of Brooklyn poet Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s second full-length collection, following The Western (1080 Press, 2023), his Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024). Across what might first seem a jumble of punctuation, shortened words and clipped text, Goldsborough offers myriad delights through an inventive and engaged lyric working at a whole other level of visual and sound effect, one that at turns sits as propulsive and precise, but ever highly purposeful, thoughtful and deliberate. Reading through this collection, I’m curious as to how such poems might sound aloud: performative and gestural, I’d suspect. “The Yung Man is a Modern Person using modern technology {whose / most valuable possession is a wrinkled piece of parchment paper inscribed / with latin text}_trying to Stay-Ahead of this Nothing he sees thru solace in / activities in The Present: getting in academic fights during master classes / at the nearby university_watching hours & hours of Home & Garden / Television, during which he described a 45 second Lowe’s Baumarkt / commercial as ‘…a capitalist assault that just won’t end…’_texting while / driving a 1996 Mercedes E-class sedan along winding county roads w/ the / windows open, blasting CDs he bought back in high school.”

Goldsborough writes the body, the black body, the black body in America, orbiting a series of concentric circles that land each and purposefully upon that radiating self, held without easy recourse in a particular social and political space. “It’s 11.11 & idk what i want.” he writes, to open the propulsive two-part “testimonial of a depressed & disillusioned student / who seeks salvation—or an easy answer—in the / ‘historically black’ nature of an UBCU & doesn’t find / what he thought would be There.,” “& times i speak in this classroom of strangers / abt ‘pure, destructive consumerism,’ ‘white supremacist capitalist / patriarchy’ n other salient / issues. / otherwise i suffer in silence & the comfort of a persistent lowkey buzz / staring blankly & the consteallations on the tiles in the ceiling / or @ the blinds imported from Venice / or  @ the unwritten possibilities on the blank board / or @ the wood pulp taking the form of a table posing as a desk. / i am feeling detached from ‘my community’: this room fully of hyphenated / american youth: [.]” He writes to find and articulate his cultural and political space, his own agency, across a sequence of frays and histories and conflicts. Or, as the poem “domestic iii” begins: “,society frays @ the seam /where / the legs are sewn together . / it was not built 2 last .”

Set in seven poem-sections—“JACQUELINE TOMATENCREMESUPPE ASCHENBECHER,” “C ON ST EL L A TI O N,” “V BROKE IN BERLIN VOL. I,” “TRAUMZEIT,” “EIGHTEEN,,,NINETEEN,” “CDMX TALES” and “NINETEEN,,,TWENNY (2)”—the poems assembled offer a combination of clipped and gestural language, shortened words and syntax and punctuation spread out into constellations. Goldsborough’s Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) is the true promise of lyric possibility made flesh.

Amy De’Ath, Not a Force of Nature

 

No community is to me
            as I once
caved in to you I said
beware! the Diversion of the Populace
            who were think is nice, maybe
unscrolling after death

and shut out of a more
            screen-time time
a common day of breathing
            the cacti the glass windows
and through them our lungs.
And through them all ways
of unseeing ourselves

            and through them (“That Well of Tears is Mine”)

The author of a handful of smaller titles over the past fourteen years, the full-length debut by Suffolk-born UK poet, critic and editor—she co-edited the anthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) with Fred Wah [see my review of such here]—Amy De’Ath is Not a Force of Nature (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), an expansive collage of lyrics set as moments, declarations, expositions and accumulations. “It’s a good night to stay home & work a delivery tread / on the yeast farm,” she writes, to open the poem “Force Of Nature,” “then pour oneself into a plaster-of-Paris / model of our own activities. It’s a fine night to entertain!” Her poems are incredibly smart, self-aware and gestural, offering commentaries and notes on ecological disaster and how capitalism reduces human capacity. “When you’re walking on a stage / The affirmation of a union / Should living offend the dead,” she writes, to open the poem “Transferable Skull,” “Or should I avenge thee / When you’re walking on a star / Managed not to get pregnant / I lied, I don’t know who you are [.]”

De’Ath writes of and on catastrophe and collapse, including a critique of Edward Burtynsky through her poem “Institutional Critique,” that includes: “Burtynsky I told you I’m not / trying to editorialize, this is not / an indictment of the industry, this is / what is it? / we are compelled to progress / to a dry toxic wastebed / Burtynsky I’m one of the foot soldiers / in the war on sustainability [.]” Structured in four sections, the collection holds two untitled bookend clusters on either side of the sections “EIGHT LOVE SONNETS” and “EIGHT WORK EMAILS.” “By refusing to sign the new contract you are / Not acting in the spirit of the contract.” she offers to open the poem “Dear Simon,” a piece signed at the end by Simon himself. In many ways, the poems in Not a Force of Nature are composed as a collection around voice and constraint, such as through articulating a sequence of characters that seemingly compose work email poems to themselves, whether hoping to catch or correct their own behaviours. Or, as “Simone” writes to herself in “Dear Simone,” “It’s wrong, what Patrick Swayze said / in his penitential prayer: this is your space, / but that’s yours too. Every time I think I’m / getting close to you we lose our touch.”