The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation is a book-length poem-memoir reflecting on Portuguese colonization of African countries and its place within the imperial and colonial forces that have shaped global history for the past 500 years. Drawing on the writings of Amílcar Cabral and others, as well as interviews with family members about life under Salazar’s dictatorship, it weaves together scholarly sources, familial narratives, and memories, exploring nationalistic myths, Portugal’s violent colonial history, and the author’s experiences growing up in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution.
Praise for The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation
Isabel Sobral Campos in her latest work in The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation deftly scripts the dawn of Portuguese colonial endeavor in Africa. By means of transparent carbon tentacles she kinetically balances lines that hover above inscriptions such as “splotches tiller light by quiet magnification” not as some punctuated Utopian scrawling but alive with a quiescent vigor that brews by endemic balance.
— Will Alexander
This book bears deep look’s all but immediate immersion in deep song. All, but. Not delay, but dawning of withdrawal as song pulls out, but not away, into its other histories. Song can’t get away when you’re in it, drawn with it, deeper into bloom, which is bouquet—dianthic, panthemic, agronomic, revolutionary. There, says Amílcar Cabral, the people are the mountains, “breaking / the physical well of internment,” digging vision’s sound and upper regress, showing how to fight in love. With love, Isabel resounds their resolution.
— Fred Moten
Unapologetically raw and generously reflective, this work is both a confrontation and a reckoning. Multiple genres—memoir, poetry, essay, polemic, footnotes—are woven so as to transform historical wounds into moments of startling beauty. All of this is held by the metaphor of the optogram: the alleged final image captured on the retina at the moment of death.
— Juliana Spahr
Working with the fugacious genre of memory, like a retinal image captured at the moment of death—particularly of a guillotined or tortured victim—The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation offers a masterful examination of recollection. Isabel Sobral Campos incisively scalps Portugal’s quincentenary colonial history with remarkable “ocular transparency” and linguistic precision. She aims through dense, pithy, noetic language to break away from the “capitalist spectrum of sameness.” It is an intelligent, precise work—less imperialistic than a poet, yet more exacting than a surgeon.
— Vi Khi Nao
Forthcoming
A ballet-poem, Ghost Gravity is structured as a series of dance numbers in verse form, from the monumental motion of groups to the intimacy of a pas de deux adagio. Staging becomings and metamorphoses, the characters unfold against categorical boundaries, shaping a world of impossible formations—a utopia of earth and sky. Ghost Gravity voices the speech of the organic and of recurrent, reenacted beginnings. It emancipates the hidden beams of light in mud and soil.
Praise for Ghost Gravity
Reading Ghost Gravity feels like being guided on a vespertine walkthrough a landscape of classical ruins, where performers emerge from camouflage with nature to enact their psychic crossings. Sobral Campos’ language dances over these grounds, tilling the soil to let air passthrough, turning ruin into respiration. Verbs and nouns trade places, performing one another’s roles. Language itself behaves like a broken colonnade or half-statue, sometimes fractured, yet even in breaking, still spouting water. Her words have great snap—each lands like a frappé—her vocabulary ranging from the diminutives of energy to the palatial. The result is a singular work that offers both ceremony and freedom from monumentality. In Sobral Campos’ hands, language becomes a vital force again—tensile and alive.
—Valerie Hsiung, author of The Pedestrian
Ghost Gravity gave me a new body. These poems stage themselves, page after page, describing a theater designed for your mind—but I swear, I heard them singing too. And you can smell them—you can smell the Earth in them. I am in awe of Isabel Sobral Campos’s music:her lines can reach into the bones; slap nameless flecks and hollow sof memory alive—shreds and dregs of being that had never hoped for witness. Incantation, regeneration–Ghost Gravity is a bloody, earthy, flowery testament—its ideas are fragrant and its action (thankfully)ridiculous. I think of ancestors—Rabelais, Beckett, Wittig, even Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, singing to each other like two mountains, two myths—for in this book Isabel Sobral Campos puts entities into dialogue that would seem to remake myth anew. What happens when a Blade of Grass encounters a Concept? When the Earth welcomes back to her ground, her embrace, worn-out ideas she so long-ago germinated, notions longpast their prime, even ghosts of themselves? Humiliation: a fall to Earth. Gravity the blessèd. Ghost Gravity the blessed.
—Ariana Reines, author of Wave of Blood
