The Hammer

Regular price $ 18.00

by Adelaide Ivanova, Chris Daniels (Translator)

Commune Editions

4/30/2019, paperback

SKU: 9781934639276

The Hammer nails its bold proclamations to the forehead of a rape culture both literary and very real, writing through a thousand silences and shattering the false transparencies of the law. Beyond this and despite a universe of oppressions, Adelaide Ivánova also manages to create a space for real intimacy between lovers. A hammer is a weapon, she reminds us, but also a tool. You can tear it all down and then build something.

Reviews:

"In these Kafkan times, when we all seem to live under a juridical curse, the fragmented poems of The Hammer are laid out like the cartography of a tribunal... However much is said, whatever accusations are made, whatever is proved, the proceedings never end. The final sentencing is always the other side of the mirror. The geography of the texts is upended, and, in the final pages of the book, the victim becomes accused in moments of raw sexual vengeance: i go cold / in your bed / purposefully / sublimating / to parade / the meat / you refuse / to serve / your self / denial. With The Hammer, Adelaide Ivánova becomes one of the foremost voices in Brazilian poetry." --Schneider Carpeggiani, Suplemento Pernambuco

"Despite being doubly silenced - first by the gag of patriarchal socialisation, then by the discourse of the law - Ivánova's poetic subject takes great pleasure in licking the envelope containing her version of the facts, her testimony...For while the context of the law might be fixed on weighing her down with the burden of truth, testing all of her statements against imaginary efforts of resistance and signs of purity, poetry - at least as Ivánova writes it - isn't beholden to that burden. With a deft and delicious twist she can turn from the language of testimony to the language of desire." --Lotte Thiessen, artiCHOKE

"The Hammer is a tool for demolishing neurotic displeasure, the submission of the body and the other infinity of repressions" -- Sergio Maciel, Escamandro

Author:

Adelaide Ivánova was born in 1982 in Recife, Brazil. She is a journalist, political activist, and community organizer, moving among poetry, photography, translation, and publishing. Her first two books are Autonomy (2014) and Polaróides (2014). Her writing, translations, and photographs have been published widely in journals such a i-D, The Huffington Post, Vogue, and Marie Claire. She edits the anarcha-feminist zine "MAIS PORNÔ, PVFR!" and tries to work as little as possible. She lives between Cologne and Berlin. Chris Daniels is a feral translator of global Lusophone poetry.