Adelaide Ivánova book 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. Ivánova’s award-winning collection, The Hammer, explores the slippery, politically fraught concepts of rape, adultery, trauma and power, ultimately tracing a path of psychic survival through verse.
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 first poetry collection, O Martelo (The Hammer) won the Rio de Janeiro Poetry Prize in 2018. 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!”.
At Dragon Hall, she will be reading alongside her poet-translator Rachel Long is a poet and the founder of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre, London. She was shortlisted for Young Poet for Laureate for London in 2014 and awarded a Jerwood/Arvon Foundation mentorship in 2015. Rachel has run poetry workshops for The Poetry School, The Serpentine Galleries and at University of Oxford. She is Assistant Tutor to Jacob Sam La-Rose on the Barbican Young Poets programme 2015-present.
Readings will be in both English and Portuguese; the conversation will be in English.
