The Hammer

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 Ivanova 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 - Ivanova'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 Ivanova 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