Isabel Sobral Campos : Five from Poems from Capital

 

 

 

 

“if commodities could speak, they would say this:”

on waiting for the blue sails, a rigged cloud

entranced by a twig trapped in a button

on waiting for the sutures to undress me

my body is a reflection of your leaving

like a supra-sensible lipstick cover

an auto-erotic artificial blow-up mouth

on waiting for the thaw of an ancient genital

a flower clad by a pig’s snout ruffling mud

on waiting for its wet verbiage to heat

a shell made of greasepaint and rouge

like defending the dead from a dead word

a contractual defaulting of my ‘depth’

on waiting for the pegged ricochet of being

a ‘self’ deprived of doors, adown & away

on waiting for the rain to wash out the cliff

& all that hangs from it by a spindly finger 

 

“the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their
use-values”

 

every puddle in this poem wets my feet

every membrane clones my daily sweat

every patter rubs my bony collarbone I got

for free every tube circles the pale heart

I was given every lotus root is a new palette

every time we sit to wring the day which keeps

distending every sheet hides my rodent hunks

& snares every silhouette conducting breath off

a silo of being, afterimage bowed by a string

as the ampersand turned bullet, not

transmitting from a wilted plant a mineral

S.O.S., bruised ballast against belittlement

every monsoon wipes half the world

 somewhere you will find a worm waiting

somewhere a larva will replace your heir,

or perhaps you will have swallowed it

 

 

“the physical body of commodity B becomes a mirror for the value of commodity A”

 

talk pack, talk erosion, the prodigal back

humphed bottled up compression of

spine & disk, each increment regimented

by gravity, I sweat with hands in unreal

pockets, so liturgical mumbling, doubting

the air pit b/w my lips, so cushy, so ileal in

digestion, the mantric beat of slow body, that

slushed sound captured in the interim of

ultrasound, a thump procrastinating b/w

life & death in the escargot rivulet, groomed

pool mirroring a body’s busy barometer

speck or thorn distorting crystal surface of

oriel breathing, this trembling figure painted

on a concave mirror, mouthing illicit phantom

we lay on our backs watching the sky’s

mutilated web between sunless trees 

 

 

“As a commodity it is a citizen of the world”

the sky lightly flickering its aging clouds

the sky spattered with lonesome stray light

from a gauged waterfall perforating veins in

wind, the sizzling froth of ancient vapors

capitulating corpse, the sky is but a bas-relief 

of storms, electric flashes subdue stone memory

the blasted corrosion in this scarred sky

sprinkled blind by torches, compilation of toxins

the sky as circadian garden spread wide

communal in radiation, collecting drones

a vent through which birds breathe

chewed up transparent bits of dying foam

a smoky unrehearsed sparkle rising

from a mountainous volcano mist

a swirl deepening the cold rutted shadow      

of rock lisping sibilant crushing wing-flap

 

 

 “20 yards of line = £2”

you look at the reflection of my name

[                                                       ]

 

bald hand rotating through swirling snow

in dark blustery of winter & its toneless trees

in the gut of a cloud time ticks around

a shadow exposing reflex resistance to speed

your eyes open to opacity, our disappearance

as slush dense with crystals, catalyzed as cones

the stillness flashes in scarlet hues, spells

an unknown planet waking up to unknown thaw

the rib is a broken branch dropping in

slow-motion lashing at the empty rock

snowflake stitched to snowflake

as the slumbering eddies prepare a murmur

you are on the flexed, purple rings of Saturn

your sleet alchemical sore on a deepened eye

 

 

 

 

Isabel Sobral Campos has published two full-length poetry manuscripts, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as several chapbooks, including, most recently, WAVE 1.0 (above/ground press, 2023). Her manuscript The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation was selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award and will be published by 2025. Her translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON is forthcoming in May 2024 with Ugly Duckling Presse. With her sister, she is a co-founder and editor of Sputnik & Fizzle press.

Rita Sobral Campos and Isabel Sobral Campos : Small Press Spirits

 

 

We launched Sputnik & Fizzle in 2015, amidst an early pregnancy, a move out west and new jobs. All of these changes implied deep transformations in our lives. The personal is political, but the personal is also publishing as politics. Small press publishing is directly embroiled in and dependent on the personal: how much time and energy one can devote to a work that exhilarates but never ceases to demand. We understood then, as we do now, that there would never be an ideal time to begin. So, we simply began. Our ethos is anti-capitalist, our commitments ideological, the work prefigurative.

The idea of S&F can be traced to a lecture that Fred Moten delivered at Threewalls in Chicago a few years ago. We became excited about the possibility of founding a press solely devoted to experimental lectures. Lectures as spatial and communal interventions, an improvised lecture, performance as lecture, lecture as book, the artist as lecture—the possibilities across disciplines and media seemed endless. We sought to connect the printed word to the ephemeral, to highlight a sense of discourse in formation, of ideas and aesthetic leanings taking shape in a conversation (but taking place in a book). In this spirit, S&F’s aesthetic couples the pamphlet with the art book. We also decided that each series should include three books/lectures. And when we recently expanded our focus to publish poetry, we retained the triad, the idea of series, and the commitment to experimental work. In the future, we hope to publish full-length poetry collections and to become an imprint for artist books and translations.

The greatest challenge for the press has been monetary. When we did manage to secure funding, we naively believed that sales of the initial series would fund the next. This was an unrealistic expectation, though it may be possible one day. It took us about two years to produce our present editions.

Some time ago, Matvei Yankelevich wrote a brilliant account chronicling the predicament of small press publishing as much as arguing for its possibilities as a political and creative practice. The ongoing struggle takes place in each reading, each encounter in which books are exchanged, discussed, and produced. It relies upon the myriad alliances brokered between groups or practitioners with access to different kinds of institutional support. S&F, for instance, has collaborated with Atlas Projectos, a publishing collective working from Lisbon and Berlin. Without this collaboration, we couldn’t have made our books. Likewise, as a visual artist and a poet respectively, the collaboration between us, siblings, has brought different skills to the press. We also draw sustenance from friends, lovers, companions, and environments. So much of ourselves has gone into the press.

The signature logo of S&F was adapted from a tiny, fabulous animal represented in a medieval illuminated manuscript, a kind of snail-bird. The absurd figure looks at us playfully askance and the tall slender legs appear to wade in invisible water. It floats and alternately sinks with unfounded confidence. It embodies the spirit of S&F.

 

Sputnik & Fizzle is run by Rita Sobral Campos and Isabel Sobral Campos.

 

 

 

 

 

Rita Sobral Campos (PT/US), born in Lisbon in 1982, lives and works in New York. Exhibitions include: O Trágico Destino Vertical, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2020); short-shorts, with August Sander, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna (2015); Tournament d’Objet, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013); Sunday Sessions, MoMA- PS1, New York (2012); When your Lips are my Ears, our Bodies become Radios, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2010); Anabasis: On Rituals of Homecoming, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Lodz (2009); UNCLEHEAD with Alexandre Singh, EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2008), and Structural Schizophrenia ou quando a mentira se tornou verdade, Culturgest, Porto (2005). Sobral Campos is a co-founder of Sputnik & Fizzle. She’s part of the Digital Corps committee at Out in Tech, building digital tools for LGBTQ+ activists around the world, and a researcher at a tech company.

Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of the collections How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020) and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as 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, BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: Poetics for the More-Than-Human World and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series. New poems are featured in Folder Magazine over the month of January.

 

Isabel Sobral Campos, Sommer Browning, Sonia Di Placido, Tunchai Redvers + Erin Emily Ann Vance : virtual reading series #14

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Isabel Sobral Campos : “The advantage of rain to think in sequence”

Isabel Sobral 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, BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and elsewhere. Chapbooks are forthcoming with Sutra Press and The Magnificent Field. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series.

Sommer Browning : “Great Things from the Department of Transportation”

Sommer Browning is the author of two books of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating (both with Birds, LLC), The Circle Book, an artist book out with Cuneiform, a joke book, You're on My Period (Counterpath Press), and various other chapbooks and editions. She draws comics, tells jokes, and runs a non-commercial art space, GEORGIA, in her garage when its warm. She's a librarian in Denver.  

Sonia Di Placido : “Viral Awakening,” “Viral Weed,” “Fleshing”

Sonia Di Placido is a poet, writer, editor and a sessional instructor of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), ESL and LINC at College Boréal. She has facilitated both independent Creative Writing and Translation Workshops and with ESL students at George Brown College in Toronto. Her poems have been published in The White Wall Review, Jacket2, Canthius Magazine, The Puritan, Carousel, The California Journal of Women Writers, Minola Review, Juniper Poetry Magazine and The Temz Review. Sonia has published 3 chapbooks. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. In September 2016, Sonia attended The China Writers' Association International Residency for the cities of Tianjin, Binhai, and Beijing as guest Poet. Poetry books Exaltation in Cadmium Red published by Guernica Editions in 2012 and Flesh, in Autumn 2018 by Guernica Editions. Reviews of Flesh can be found in The Temz Review and the Quill and Quire. Blog: diplacido.wordpress.com

Viral Awakening

every morning there is an unheard listening

an imperceptible limp in the chest—heaving

a heart beats its echolocation as if underneath earplugs

wrangled limbs retort from a serene blood flow

                                    alarming consciousness

Isolate, is that how we are meant to hear ourselves rising?

The hot breath will say, “I should have

listened more to the inner echoes at dawn” now yawn,

like an undead essence           stand apart

with the living.

Viral Weed

I am the most finite of particles

undetected by human eyes.

Having released my speedy exhaust

into novel form flowering forward

onto Earth’s global Spring, this species

blows out its breath, inhales vacuous for

an entrance or invitation? What’s left

of me is dead undead, a microbe floating

for the welcome and warm insides of a host.

Vestibules or veins, my pathogen portends

itself, proteins cling weightless—now

a living germ vanquishing at spores.

I have my own way of cheating

every body’s plague does.

Tunchai Redvers : “intergenerational trauma,” “two halves of one whole,” “untitled”

Tunchai Redvers is a Dene/Metis two-spirit social justice warrior, writer, and wanderer belonging to Deninu K’ue First Nation. Born and raised in Treaty 8 territory, Northwest Territories, she is now living in Toronto. With a Master of Indigenous Social work, she is the co-founder of We Matter, a national organization dedicated to Indigenous youth hope and life promotion. Recognized nationally and internationally for her work, her advocacy and writing centers the reclamation and indigenization of identity, mental health and healing. She published her debut book, Fireweed, in 2019 with Kegedonce Press at the young age of 25. Fireweed can purchased online at chapters.indigo.ca.

Erin Emily Ann Vance : “We Used Bleach,” “The Mouth of Lynnhaven,” “The Purported Last Words of Ruth Blay”

Erin Emily Ann Vance is the author of Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers (Stonehouse Publishing 2019) and five chapbooks of poetry. She holds a master's degree in English and creative writing from the University of Calgary and studies folklore at University College Dublin.