Books

“Salette Tavares’ 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’ penetrating, methodical, and pugilist poetry for readers of English and lays a gilded wreath around its astonishing feats.”

— Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

“Reading these poems I can’t but think of an exquisite, part Surreal, part Fluxus dinner party with Francis Ponge, Ana Hatherly, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, Matisse, and the De Campos brothers seated at the table amongst Salette Tavares’s family members and others. At some point they’d all perform “Shoe,” an absurdist liturgical poem and perhaps the most subversive text in this book allowing us to witness the radical transfiguration of the quotidian before our very eyes.”

— Mónica de la Torre