the hammer

This remarkable collection is a selection from Adelaide Ivánova’s award-winning book the hammer (o martelo). This unsettling work considers both sexualised violence and consensual sex through a single narrative voice. It explores post-rape experience in a morally bankrupt justice system and offers potent expression of female sexuality – within and beyond the bounds of marriage – in poems that are challenging, profound, and darkly comic. Ivánova’s work is a form of impassioned resistance that delivers a necessary shock to the system. Includes an afterword by Emily Critchley.

"Ivánova sings of bodily fragmentations and argues that these ruptures are the only way of representing the whole body in an unjust system. The hammer, in poems that frame the pamphlet, is both judgment and weapon, is language and physics, is inevitable and not: a tool of interrogation and resistance."
- Annie Fan, Modern Poetry in Translation