Tavares, Salette / Campos & Petersen-Overton (trs.): LEX ICON

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2024

Translators: Isabel Sobral Campos, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

Publisher Marketing: For the first time appearing in English translation, the poems in LEX ICON present everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. The habitual uses of objects that these poems study point to the inherent philosophical content of the human capacity to produce, or poiesis. Much as abstraction in its representation of things as pictorial patterns at times distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, Tavares's poems accomplish this distillation through language. In this way, LEX ICON connects this writer's earlier poetry with her graphic sculptural poems. It foregrounds insights about human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in household objects linked to the most bare necessities; and yet, it also presents them as almost mystical artifacts that partake of some unnamed ritual. Salette Tavares (1922–94) was a Portuguese writer, theorist, and visual artist. She was a member of the experimental poetry group PO.EX and was involved in the publication of the first issues of Poesia Experimental. Her books include Quadrada (Moraes Editores), LEX ICON (Moraes Editores), Obra Poética 1957–1971 (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), and Poesia Gráfica (Casa Fernando Pessoa). Her spatial poems were exhibited at the 2014 retrospective, Salette Tavares: Spatial Poetry, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. PRAISE "Salette Tavares's LEX ICON is a tour de force that catalyzes the dualistic tension between word/thing and human/artifice. The book acts upon the distrust of language and reality, foreshadowing contemporary debates between Continental and Analytical philosophy and within the seductive illusions of the disinformation age. In poems on the peculiarly boundaried nature of our shared material reality, Tavares explores an anarchic and cinematic Welt (mundo, world, ālam) rich in the abecedarian and profane. Her text's elliptical bangs, pauses, reverbs, and collisions roam the psychoanalytical and phenomenological, the theatrical absurdist and the empty room. Informed by sensibilities both Beckettian and Buddhist, poems with seemingly innocuous titles like 'Tablecloth' train our attention back on language and object, whose domesticated familiarity we have long taken for granted. Isabel Sobral Campos and Kristofer Petersen-Overton's first collaborative translation awakens Tavares's penetrating, methodical, and pugilist poetry for readers of English and lays a gilded wreath around its astonishing feats." —Maryam Monalisa Gharavi