Lex Icon
Lex Icon
$20.00
In stock
About the Book
Appearing for the first time in English translation, LEX ICON presents everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. As abstraction distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, so too do Tavares’s poems distill the essence of everyday items in language. LEX ICON connects Tavares’s early poetry to her later graphic sculptural poems. Foregrounding insights into human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in simple household objects, the poems collected here also present these as almost mystical artifacts that partake in some unnamed ritual.
Author
Salette Tavares
Salette Tavares (1922-1994) 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.
Translators
Isabel Sobral Campos
Isabel Sobral Campos’s new book is How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press). Other works include Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), Material (No, Dear and Small Anchor Press), You Will Be Made of Stone (dancing girl press), Autobiographical Ecology (Above/Ground Press), and Sobriety Crystal (The Magnificent Field). Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series.
Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton
Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, Politics/Letters, and WarScapes. He teaches political theory at Babson College and lives in Cambridge, MA.
Praise
In the News
Links
Salette Tavares’ concrete poems appeared in Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre’s Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (Primary Information, 2020).
Excerpt
SHOE
Liturgical poem about the shoe. While reading this aloud, one should rigorously observe the instructions in the margin. Do not forget to recite using a microphone connected to several loudspeakers at high volume. Place a shoe upon a table. The faithful who observe this ceremony should stand barefoot with a shoe in each hand.
Officiant (standing): The shoe
the shoe alone.
EVERYONE: A shoe just shoe.
Officiant: The mouth shoe
the nose shoe
the ear shoe
the hand shoe
the eye shoe
the leg shoe
the shoulder shoe
the breast shoe
the stomach shoe
the sex shoe
the knee shoe
the foot shoe.
EVERYONE (on their knees): The shoe
just
shoe.