There are stories that history preserves, and there are stories that history cannot contain. There are stories told in ink, safely pressed between pages, and others written in blood, in bone, in the unquiet breath of the dead. And then there are stories—rare, ferocious, and enduring—that refuse burial. They return. They whisper beneath the soil. They claw their way back through time, demanding voice, demanding witness, demanding language. The story of Pedro and Inês belongs to this last category: not a legend, but a wound that never sealed; not a romance, but a haunting that Portugal has carried for more than six centuries.

Yet even within this long tradition of retelling, Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista’s Book of Tongues: The Dead Letters of Pedro & Inês emerges not as another iteration, but as something far more unsettling, far more incandescent: a resurrection. Not the polite revival of a canonical tale, but an exhumation—violent, lyrical, and unrelenting—where the dead speak, accuse, seduce, and refuse the consolations of closure.

As I note in my own reflection included in the volume, this is not a retelling but “a poetic resurrection that persists in remembering, naming the unspeakable, and speaking back.” The distinction is crucial. Retellings belong to history; resurrection belongs to language. And here, language is not merely the vehicle of memory—it is its battlefield.

From its opening invocation—”Unbury me. Reverse the dirt” —this sublime poetic text announces its refusal of silence. Inês does not ask to be remembered; she demands to be unearthed. The imperative is physical, visceral, almost sacramental: hands in soil, fingernails torn, blood exchanged for forgiveness. This is the grammar of a poetics that understands that memory is not passive recollection but an act of violence against forgetting. In this sense, Book of Tongues aligns itself not with the elegiac tradition, but with a darker lineage—closer perhaps to the restless hauntings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the polyphonic lamentations of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the dead refuse the decorum of absence and instead insist on their continued presence within the living. But told in a refined and erudite poetic language that crosses many thresholds. 

What Matos and Baptista achieve formally is as radical as their thematic ambition. The book unfolds as a sequence of epistolary fragments—letters exchanged not only between Pedro and Inês, but also between Pedro and Inês’s son, João (Bicho), Constança, and spectral echoes of history itself. These are not letters in the conventional sense; they are ruptures in time, voices unmoored from chronology. As one of the endorsers, ire’ne lara silva, observes, these are “dead letters we send between worlds… a betrayal against time.” The betrayal is deliberate: time, in this text, is not linear but recursive, a wound that reopens with each utterance.

The multiplicity of voices recalls the great modernist experiments in fragmentation and interiority, yet Book of Tongues surpasses mere technique. Its polyphony is not an aesthetic ornament but an ethical necessity. The historical narrative of Pedro and Inês—of forbidden love, political violence, and posthumous coronation—has long been told through the lens of male power. Here, however, Inês reclaims the center, her voice searing, accusatory, unyielding. “A man must answer for all his misplaced paradises,” she declares, transforming the romantic myth into a critique of patriarchal violence and historical erasure.

This re-centering resonates profoundly with contemporary concerns. In an era marked by renewed struggles over gender, power, and historical memory, Book of Tongues feels uncannily urgent. The murdered woman is no longer a passive symbol of tragic beauty; she becomes an active agent of narrative disruption. As Brenda Cárdenas writes in her praise, the text reveals “the psychological trauma suffered by all, especially Inês,” foregrounding the cost of a system that renders women expendable. The legend is thus reframed not as a timeless romance but as a case study in the politics of the body—how it is controlled, silenced, and, in this text, defiantly reanimated.

Yet to read the book solely through a political lens would be to miss its deeper, more unsettling achievement: its reimagining of language itself. The “tongue” in Book of Tongues is at once literal and symbolic—organ of speech, relic of violence, instrument of power. It is severed, preserved, passed down, fetishized, and feared. “From her wounds flow our words, from her body is the book,” Pedro proclaims , collapsing the distinction between text and flesh. Writing here is not metaphorically embodied; it is materially so. The book becomes a corpus, a body of language carved from trauma.

This conflation of body and text places Book of Tongues in conversation with a broader tradition of experimental literature that interrogates the limits of representation. One thinks of Anne Carson’s hybrid works, where classical myth is refracted through contemporary poetics, or Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, with its insistence on writing the body. Yet Matos and Baptista bring to this tradition a distinctly Luso-American sensibility, inflected by diaspora, multilingualism, and the layered histories of Portugal itself. The language shifts between registers—lyrical, brutal, incantatory—mirroring the instability of the identities it seeks to articulate.

Rui Zink, in his contribution, captures the sense of wonder that permeates the work: “a two-voiced poem… a fresh approach… a legend embedded in fact.” But even this masterful description feels insufficient. The book is not merely two-voiced; it is a chorus of ghosts, each voice echoing and distorting the others. The effect is disorienting, at times overwhelming, but always purposeful. The reader is not allowed the comfort of a single perspective; instead, one is drawn into what I described as “a realm where tongues become relics, wounds become maps, and ghosts never rest.”

This notion of the wound as a map is particularly striking. It suggests that trauma is not only something to be endured but also something that charts the contours of identity. The geography of Book of Tongues is not the Portugal of historical record, but a psychic landscape shaped by loss, desire, and vengeance. The Tagus River, the monastery of Alcobaça, the spectral echoes of the Iberian past—all are reimagined as sites of linguistic and emotional excavation.

In this sense, the book participates in a long tradition of reworking national myths, yet it does so with a transnational, even postnational, sensibility. The Pedro and Inês story, while deeply rooted in Portuguese history, becomes here a universal meditation on love and its discontents. The specificity of the myth does not limit its reach; rather, it amplifies it. By grounding its experimentation in a well-known narrative, the text invites readers to reconsider not only this particular story but the very nature of storytelling itself.

If there is a risk in such an ambitious project, it lies in the potential for excess. The language of Book of Tongues is often dense, baroque, and even overwhelming in its imagery. But this excess is not gratuitous; it is integral to the book’s aesthetic. The lushness of the poetic prose mirrors the intensity of the emotions it seeks to convey. As one reader notes, the work is “lush and savage,” a combination that captures its dual nature: beauty intertwined with brutality.

Ultimately, what makes Book of Tongues a masterpiece is not simply its formal innovation or its thematic depth, but its capacity to transform a familiar story into something startlingly new. It does not ask us to admire Pedro and Inês from a distance; it forces us to inhabit their world, to feel the weight of their desires and the consequences of their actions. It is, in every sense, an immersive experience—a text that demands not just to be read, but to be endured.

And yet, even that is not enough. For this is not a book one finishes. It lingers, it stains, it returns—like the voices it contains. It alters the reader’s own language, leaving behind an echo, a fracture, and a new awareness of what words can carry when sharpened by grief and memory. In a world increasingly deafened by noise, Book of Tongues insists on a different kind of listening—the kind that requires stillness, vulnerability, and the courage to hear what has long been silenced.

More than six hundred years after their deaths, Pedro and Inês speak again—not as relics of a distant past, but as urgent presences in our own fractured moment. Through the fierce, unflinching artistry of Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista, their story becomes not only a testament to the endurance of love but also a reminder of the power of language to resurrect, resist, and reimagine the world.

And when the final page closes—if it ever truly does—something remains open. A grave, perhaps. A mouth. A question that refuses rest. For what this book ultimately leaves us with is not resolution, but reckoning: with history, with language, with the bodies that bear both. The tongues have been unearthed. They have spoken. And now, having heard them, we are no longer permitted the innocence of silence.

Diniz Borges

Carlo Matos is a bi+/poly author who has published 13 books, including We Prefer the Damned (Unbound Edition Press) and As Malcriadas or Names We Inherit (New Meridian, 2022). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as Hobart, Rhino, PANK, DMQ Review, and Diagram, among many others. His books have been reviewed in such places as Kirkus Reviews, Boston Review, Iowa Review and Portuguese American Journal. Carlo has received grants and fellowships from Disquiet ILP (Portugal), CantoMundo, the Illinois Arts Council, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the La Romita School of Art (Italy). He is a founding member of the Portuguese American writers collective Kale Soup for the Soul and a winner of the Heartland Poetry Prize. He currently lives in Chicago, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a former MMA fighter and kickboxer. Follow him on Instagram @carlomatos8. Check out his blog at carlomatos.blogspot.com.

Amy Sayre Baptista’s writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter and other journals. Her chapbook, PRIMITIVITY, won the Black River Chapbook contest (2017). She is a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo fellow (2013), and a scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011). She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artists collective, and is a co-founder of Plates & Poetry, a community table program focused on food and writing. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

You can order the book directly from the publisher using the link below.

https://www.flowersongpress.com/books/p/book-of-tongues-by-carlo-matos-and-amy-sayre-baptista