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

Futurepoem, paperback

Publication Date: September 2, 2025

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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.

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. Drawing from Amílcar Cabral’s writings, as well as family interviews, personal experiences, and scholarly research, 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, author of The Italy Letters

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