After a five-year hiatus, Jabuti finalist Catarina Lins returns with her new book, Correio da Noite [Night Mail]. In this collection, the poet revisits the montage techniques that have drawn critical attention since her debut publication, expanding them to create a novel interplay of images drawn from films, photographs, letters, and instant messages in order to tell someone something. This indeterminacy—both of the addressee and of the subject matter—does nothing to diminish the power of the poems (or are they fragmented letters? interrupted phone calls?) that make up Correio da Noite. These texts are themselves interrupted by a prose narrative that also appears in fragments throughout the book’s pages. What might, at first glance, seem like gratuitous hermeticism or the self-indulgence of formal experimentation instead leads us, somewhat unexpectedly, to a place that feels deeply recognizable and, consequently, comforting. This is because the project’s central challenge—and also its aim—is to navigate the broken promise of enunciation, grounded in the understanding that all language, even when addressed to a silent recipient, is always shared.

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