Before marble learned to carry their bodies into eternity, before Alcobaça became the solemn architecture of a love larger than death, before chroniclers disciplined passion into genealogy and consequence and poets turned catastrophe into one of the enduring myths of Portugal, there was a wound, and inside that wound, perhaps, there was already a voice. Seven centuries have not exhausted the story of Pedro and Inês because it has never belonged entirely to history. It inhabits that more mysterious territory where fact passes into legend without relinquishing truth, where memory acquires the radiance of myth, where a murdered woman and a grieving king become more than themselves and enter the inexhaustible imagination of a people. Few stories in Portuguese civilization have been told so often, sung so often, painted, sculpted, dramatized, mourned, and monumentalized. The very abundance of that inheritance should make another telling almost impossible. Yet Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista accomplish something infinitely more audacious than another telling in Book of Tongues: The Dead Letters of Pedro & Inês. They do not merely return to the legend. They alter the conditions by which the legend can be heard. They enter beneath its marble, beneath its inherited beauty, beneath the consolations of romance, and listen until something begins moving in the dark. What returns is not history reconstructed but consciousness exhumed. The dead come back because language refuses to accept burial as the final grammar of existence.
Inês speaks first, and with four words she overturns centuries of literary expectation: “Unbury me. Reverse the dirt.” This is not a plea for remembrance. Remembrance would still leave her underground. She demands reversal itself: earth undone, chronology violated, the grave compelled to surrender its authority. Poetry here becomes more than elegy, more than memorial, more even than resurrection in any conventional religious sense. It becomes resistance to disappearance. History can tell us what happened; poetry can ask what has never ceased happening. The difference is enormous. History arranges the past into sequence. Poetry allows the past to remain dangerously present. Thus, Inês is not merely remembered; she remembers. Pedro is not merely the legendary lover who avenged her; he is summoned to answer for the distance between desire and courage, promise and protection. Their son may speak from within the body of inherited trauma. Constança, so often relegated to the margins of the canonical romance, may recover the dignity of her own wound. The past is not reconstructed in these pages. It is reopened, and what enters through that opening is not nostalgia but unfinished life.
This is why the book’s epistolary architecture feels so inevitable and so original. Every letter is born from absence. A letter presupposes separation, delay, the possibility that the desired reader may never answer; it is language sent into uncertainty. From Ovid’s Heroides onward, correspondence has carried the melancholy knowledge that the beloved is elsewhere. Matos and Baptista deepen that condition until distance itself becomes metaphysical. These letters travel not merely between rooms, kingdoms, or centuries, but between forms of being. They are, as the book later calls them, “dead letters we send between worlds.” The phrase contains the work’s entire mystery. A dead letter, ordinarily, is a message that cannot arrive. Here, impossibly, it arrives more completely than ordinary correspondence ever could, because it passes through us. The reader becomes the third presence in every exchange, the living chamber in which the dead reach one another. We are not spectators at this literary séance; we become its medium. To read is to deliver. To continue reading is to participate in the unburial.
Rui Zink immediately recognized the formal strangeness of this achievement when he observed that the book “begins with a letter, follows as a two-voiced poem, and unravels as a play,” calling it “a legend embedded in fact” and confessing, finally, that “magic should never be explained.” He is right to resist explanation. Book of Tongues continually exceeds the genres through which we might contain it. Letters become dramatic monologues; dramatic monologues become incantations; poetry becomes archaeology; history becomes dream; the archive turns prophetic. What seems at first an epistolary sequence gradually becomes something closer to a chamber work composed for the dead, each voice distinct yet entering, interrupting, haunting, and revising the others. Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony comes inevitably to mind, but even that seems insufficient. Pedro, Inês, Bicho, and Constança do not merely coexist as independent consciousnesses; they inhabit no ordinary shared present. Their voices move across mortality itself. What emerges is a spectral polyphony, a necropolyphony, in which truth belongs to no single speaker because memory itself is plural. Every voice carries an incompleteness another voice exposes. Every tenderness casts a shadow. Every accusation discovers another grief.
At the center of all this is the tongue, one of the most audacious and fertile symbols in contemporary poetry. The tongue is speech and body, language and wound, nationality and exile, eroticism and testimony, inheritance and rebellion. It becomes relic, compass, archive, prophecy, contraband, scripture. It points north, remembers histories, translates tides, passes through generations. Yet it never becomes merely abstract. The poets insist upon its physicality: wet, vulnerable, muscular flesh, capable of being cut from the mouth. That corporeal insistence is essential. Language in Book of Tongues is never purified spirit. It is injured flesh continuing to speak. The title therefore contains not simply the collection’s principal metaphor but its entire philosophy: power may sever the organ, but it cannot determine the afterlife of the voice.
Nowhere is this poetics expressed more magnificently than in the declaration: “From her wounds flow our words, from her body is the book.”The line is almost an ars poetica for the entire work. Literature does not emerge despite the wound; it flows from it. The female body, historically subjected to dynastic use and political erasure, becomes manuscript. Hélène Cixous’s vision of a writing born from the female body seems to find here an extraordinary poetic incarnation, but Matos and Baptista never allow theory to eclipse flesh. The wound remains a wound. The body remains violated. What changes is the meaning of silence. The execution intended to erase Inês. Poetry makes her inexhaustible. And, crucially, she does not return as a saint. Sanctification can itself become another form of silence, preserving a woman by simplifying her. This Inês is tender, vindictive, erotic, maternal, grotesque, lucid, wounded, prophetic. She can love Pedro and condemn him in the same breath. She can desire reunion while withholding absolution. Her greatness lies in contradiction because consciousness itself is contradictory.
The old legend often allows Pedro’s spectacular grief to dominate the emotional horizon: the vengeance, the exhumation, the posthumous coronation, the magnificent tomb. Book of Tongues shifts that center of gravity. Inês is not merely the beloved whose death creates Pedro’s legend; Pedro must now exist under the gaze of the woman whose death his love could not prevent. “You made promises, Pedro. Promises you could not keep,” she tells him. The sentence contains a moral revolution. Love is no longer vindicated merely because it was intense. It must answer for its failures. Pedro’s vengeance cannot retroactively become protection. His suffering cannot erase the terrible interval between promise and action. And yet the poets resist the easier cruelty of judgment. Pedro remains deeply human because his failure does not invalidate his love; it reveals love’s tragic insufficiency before power. One of the book’s most philosophically beautiful lines makes that instability explicit: “Love is a choice. Marshal it, index it, flux it, inflect it, section it as you may, it always looks like doubt.”Love becomes grammar, anatomy, strategy, classification, yet survives every attempt to master it. Language can dissect the experience; the mystery remains alive.
The same moral imagination gives Constança and Bicho extraordinary depth. Constança refuses the indignity of functioning merely as an obstacle between legendary lovers. She enters the correspondence bearing her own history, intelligence, sorrow, and knowledge of what dynastic necessity does to those required to inhabit it. Bicho, meanwhile, may be the book’s most haunting invention: grief made anatomical, inheritance made deformity, history written into bone. Trauma does not finish when the executioner lowers the sword. It continues through children, memory, names, bodies. When Inês insists that no mother births monsters, monstrosity shifts from the wounded child toward the political order that produced the wound. Tina Jenkins Bell therefore reaches one of the collection’s profound truths when she observes that “trauma, grief, disappointment, and alienation” travel not merely through life but beyond death. The supernatural here is not decorative. It is the only imaginative form adequate to trauma’s refusal of chronology.
That refusal is everywhere. “Who can know what tense to live in, what tense to speak in, what tense to die in?” Inês asks. Grammar becomes metaphysics. The dead inhabit past, present, and future simultaneously; memory remains present, regret rewrites what has already happened, prophecy leaks into what has not yet occurred. Time itself becomes unstable under the pressure of grief. In this sense, the book does something history cannot permit itself to do: it allows simultaneity to replace chronology. The dead may revise themselves. The wounded may answer those who interpreted their wounds. The child may carry a memory older than his own consciousness. The result is not confusion but a deeper order, the strange temporal order through which grief inhabits us.
No image expresses the intersection of history, gender, and power more daringly than the transformation of Inês’s body into cartography: “Carve the compass rose into her tongue… Cut an archipelago from the skin at her calf.” Portugal itself becomes anatomical. Bodies become maps; maps become kingdoms; kingdoms become wounds. Before empire maps the oceans, patriarchal power maps the woman. Her womb becomes treaty, her beauty dynastic mathematics, her body terrain upon which succession and sovereignty may be secured. Yet the poem reverses the violence it describes. The body once mapped by power becomes the map through which language returns us to what power attempted to erase. The Portuguese landscape enters flesh, and flesh enters history. The Tagus, Alcobaça, Alfama, the Mouraria, Adamastor, archipelagos, salt, sea, compass, stars: none appears as decorative Lusitanian scenery. Portugal becomes consciousness itself.
This is one reason ire’ne lara silva’s description of the book’s “visceral language” is so exact. The dead here “remember and resist.” Remembrance is resistance because official memory inevitably makes violence cleaner than it was. Marble does this beautifully. Alcobaça preserves one of Europe’s great monuments to love, but beauty can pacify catastrophe. Marble refines blood into contemplation. Book of Tongues refuses that serenity without ever diminishing the beauty of the tombs. It restores the blood beneath the marble. Before the sculpted lovers there was a woman’s body; before national legend there were frightened children; before the magnificence of grief there was political murder. The poets do not desecrate the monument. They make the monument remember.
Brenda Cárdenas writes that the voices possess such “authenticity and emotional resonance” that one forgets one is reading poems and becomes absorbed in the letters themselves. That may be the highest praise possible, because it describes the moment when craft becomes invisible and only consciousness remains. It also illuminates the extraordinary collaboration between Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Baptista. Collaborative writing so often displays its seams; here the seams disappear. Two poets create several voices, yet the work possesses the strange coherence of a single haunted imagination. One ceases asking which poet created which voice because the question becomes irrelevant. The speakers seem to have generated their authors rather than the reverse. Perhaps this is the magic Rui Zink wisely declines to explain.
And the poets themselves trust that mystery. They resist the temptation to close their metaphors, resolve their contradictions, or make the strange entirely intelligible. Rilke understood that beauty carries terror within it, that mystery diminished by explanation ceases to possess its deepest authority. Matos and Baptista understand this too. The wasp need not mean one thing. Neither does the fig, the tongue, the map, the sea, the grave. Their images remain alive because they remain open. The wasp answers the fig; the tongue answers the map; the child answers the mother; the monastery answers the body; the sea answers every silence. Gradually the book ceases to appear sequential at all. It becomes a constellation.
Perhaps that is why Book of Tongues ultimately refuses to belong exclusively to either Portugal or the Portuguese language. Written in English, in the United States, by Portuguese-American poets, it inhabits a transatlantic space larger than national classification. Its language is English, but Portuguese memory moves beneath it like an underground river. It is neither Portugal translated nor Portugal nostalgically recovered. It is Portuguese history reimagined through an American literary consciousness, proving that diaspora, at its most creative, does not merely preserve inheritance; it transforms it, carrying an ancient story into another language, another geography, another century. The Atlantic ceases to divide worlds and becomes what it has always secretly been: a passage along which memory travels, altered yet undiminished.
The greatest works are always born somewhere, but they never remain there. Dante began as a Florentine and became universal. Cervantes began in La Mancha and ended wherever human dignity continues laughing against despair. Camões sailed with Portugal but navigated the larger oceans of exile, mortality, desire, and memory. Matos and Baptista never abandon the Portuguese identity of Pedro and Inês; they descend so deeply into it that it becomes recognizable to anyone who has loved beyond reason, mourned beyond consolation, or searched within memory for someone the world had declared irretrievable. Pessoa famously made the Portuguese language his homeland. Book of Tongues gently enlarges that intuition. Perhaps our first homeland is not language but voice: the singular cadence through which another human being once called our name. Voice precedes grammar. Listening precedes speech. Belonging precedes geography.
And calling is precisely what these poems do. Pedro does not merely write Inês; he calls her. Inês summons Bicho. Constança speaks herself back into history. Long before poetry became literature, it was invocation: a calling toward absent gods, departed ancestors, lost lovers, the dead. Book of Tongues restores that ancient vocation with astonishing modern force. There is something of Orpheus here, but the myth has been magnificently reversed. Orpheus descends seeking Eurydice. Here Eurydice speaks first. Inês does not wait for rescue. She orders resurrection: “Unbury me. Reverse the dirt.” History silenced her body. Poetry returns her voice.
Near the end of the book, that immense architecture of history, myth, body, language, politics, and memory suddenly contracts into a sentence almost unbearable in its simplicity: “I’ve covered the world with my words when all I really wanted was you.” There lies the secret heart of literature. Language may cross centuries. Books may survive kingdoms. Poetry may outlive empires. Yet somewhere beneath every great act of writing remains the desire to reach one irreplaceable presence. The world may be covered in words, and still one voice waits for another.
Perhaps this is why Book of Tongues asks to be more than read. It asks to be listened to, reread, inhabited. In an age increasingly governed by acceleration, immediacy, and distraction, such a demand becomes almost countercultural. The book asks us to slow our attention until we become worthy of the voices entrusted to us. Simone Weil understood attention as one of the purest forms of generosity, and this book demands precisely that generosity: not hurried admiration, not passing applause, but the contemplative attention reserved for works that appear to continue thinking while we are away from them. Youth may first encounter a love story here; maturity may hear its meditation on history and responsibility; age may finally understand its conversation with mortality. The book grows because the reader grows.
One hesitates, finally, even to call it a collection of poems. The phrase seems too small. It is a chamber work for many voices, a philosophical correspondence, an extended elegy, a dramatic liturgy, an illuminated manuscript, an anatomy of remembrance, a resurrection written in letters. Perhaps it is simply what its title has promised from the beginning: a book in the fullest sense, a world possessing its own emotional weather, its own symbolic laws, its own strange geography of the living and the dead.
And that may be its final miracle. Book of Tongues reminds us that literature has never been merely the art of arranging beautiful language. It is the more difficult, audacious, necessary art of keeping one another alive through memory. A kingdom could silence Inês’s body, but it could not foresee the endurance of the tongue. It could not know that flesh might become manuscript, that grief might become grammar, that a severed voice could travel farther than the command that severed it. It could not know that centuries later, on another shore of the Atlantic and in another language, two poets would enter the old tomb not to disturb its dead but to listen.
The letters have arrived. And after them, silence can no longer pretend innocence. Where memory endures, silence never becomes absolute; where silence fails, the dead continue speaking; and where the dead continue speaking, poetry has not merely survived. It has fulfilled its oldest promise.
Diniz Borges for Filamentos
To order the book, please use the link below
https://www.flowersongpress.com/books/p/book-of-tongues-by-carlo-matos-and-amy-sayre-baptista