Ghost Gravity by Isabel Sobral Campos
SKU:
$16.00
$12.00
$12.00
per item
*Sold as a tête-bêche with Andrew Farkas' The Ancient Mysteries of Las Vegas
*Special pre-sale price until June 9, 2026
A ballet-poem, Ghost Gravity is structured as a series of dance numbers in verse form, from the monumental motion of groups to the intimacy of a pas de deux adagio. Staging becomings and metamorphoses, the characters unfold against categorical boundaries, shaping a world of impossible formations—a utopia of earth and sky. Ghost Gravity voices the speech of the organic and of recurrent, reenacted beginnings. It emancipates the hidden beams of light in mud and soil.
Reading Ghost Gravity feels like being guided on a vespertine walkthrough a landscape of classical ruins, where performers emerge from camouflage with nature to enact their psychic crossings. Sobral Campos’ language dances over these grounds, tilling the soil to let air passthrough, turning ruin into respiration. Verbs and nouns trade places, performing one another’s roles. Language itself behaves like a broken colonnade or half-statue, sometimes fractured, yet even in breaking, still spouting water. Her words have great snap—each lands like a frappé—her vocabulary ranging from the diminutives of energy to the palatial. The result is a singular work that offers both ceremony and freedom from monumentality. In Sobral Campos’ hands, language becomes a vital force again—tensile and alive.
—Valerie Hsiung, author of The Pedestrian
Ghost Gravity gave me a new body. These poems stage themselves, page after page, describing a theater designed for your mind—but I swear, I heard them singing too. And you can smell them—you can smell the Earth in them. I am in awe of Isabel Sobral Campos’s music:her lines can reach into the bones; slap nameless flecks and hollow sof memory alive—shreds and dregs of being that had never hoped for witness. Incantation, regeneration--Ghost Gravity is a bloody, earthy, flowery testament—its ideas are fragrant and its action (thankfully)ridiculous. I think of ancestors—Rabelais, Beckett, Wittig, even Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, singing to each other like two mountains, two myths—for in this book Isabel Sobral Campos puts entities into dialogue that would seem to remake myth anew. What happens when a Blade of Grass encounters a Concept? When the Earth welcomes back to her ground, her embrace, worn-out ideas she so long-ago germinated, notions longpast their prime, even ghosts of themselves? Humiliation: a fall to Earth. Gravity the blessèd. Ghost Gravity the blessed.
--Ariana Reines, author of Wave of Blood
—Valerie Hsiung, author of The Pedestrian
Ghost Gravity gave me a new body. These poems stage themselves, page after page, describing a theater designed for your mind—but I swear, I heard them singing too. And you can smell them—you can smell the Earth in them. I am in awe of Isabel Sobral Campos’s music:her lines can reach into the bones; slap nameless flecks and hollow sof memory alive—shreds and dregs of being that had never hoped for witness. Incantation, regeneration--Ghost Gravity is a bloody, earthy, flowery testament—its ideas are fragrant and its action (thankfully)ridiculous. I think of ancestors—Rabelais, Beckett, Wittig, even Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, singing to each other like two mountains, two myths—for in this book Isabel Sobral Campos puts entities into dialogue that would seem to remake myth anew. What happens when a Blade of Grass encounters a Concept? When the Earth welcomes back to her ground, her embrace, worn-out ideas she so long-ago germinated, notions longpast their prime, even ghosts of themselves? Humiliation: a fall to Earth. Gravity the blessèd. Ghost Gravity the blessed.
--Ariana Reines, author of Wave of Blood