NEW POETRY FROM ISABEL SOBRAL CAMPOS BRINGS LIFE TO THE WRECKAGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE
Updated: Oct 3, 2020
Blue Figure Press to release second poetry collection, How to Make Words of Rubble.
Isabel Sobral Campos will be reading from her new poetry collection, How to Make Worlds of Rubble at the St. Rocco’s Poetry Collective Reading for the Dis-possessed. This will mark the official release of the collection, which will afterwards be available for sale in select stores and on the Blue Figure Press online shop.
A hurricane whips through an auditorium of stonebark. A rock lugs a secret song from within the earth. Two entities, daughter and Grendel’s mother from Beowulf, coalesce in a speaker’s single body, a trinity altar searching for the emaciation of storms.
How to Make Words of Rubble is a book-length poem that narrates maternal grief and anxiety, regurgitating the languid remains of abject motherhood from the depths of an Old English swamp. A hybrid between choral ode and musical score, the poem seeks a new horology, a resurrected capacity to inhabit time in the presence of disaster. It is also a dirge hauled upon a mother’s impaled head to Heorot. This poem ruminates in the dead of ecology.
Campos is the author of the poetry collection Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), and the chapbooks Material (No, Dear and Small Anchor Press, 2015), You Will Be Made of Stone (dancing girl press, 2018), and Autobiographical Ecology (Above/Ground Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail,as well as in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars:Poetics for the More-Than-Human World. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series.
Blue Figure Press is quickly distinguishing themselves from other small presses as a home for poets exploring the limits of formal composition, digging into the deepest roots of English poetry. Their first collection, Segue by Chris Carson, yanked the conventions of pastoral poetry into the 21st century and dropped it in the middle of the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearing. The work received praise from Lyn Hejinian for its twisting narrative and Ariana Reines for its confrontation of our shared political reality.
If you are interested in reviewing How to Make Words of Rubble or scheduling an interview with the Sobral Compos, please reach out to editor@bluefigurepress.com.
Pre-order How to Make Words of Rubble here