The Writer

The Writer (O Escritor) Ana Hatherly's collection of visual and asemic work returns us to the subversive potential of the hand and its ability to unsettle and reorient language, speech, and expression. With its commitment to writer and reader as fellow travelers and to new visionary possibilities for the written word, The Writer is a landmark in the history of visual poetry. 30 images play on the movement of letters into and beyond language. The images invite the reader to engage with the text and the written form as it manifests through images, as material of plastic arts, as textual language expressed visually taken from the utterance of the mouth and transformed into narratives not possible with grammar. The Writer (O Escritor) is a collection of visual poems, asemic expressions, and lettrist experiments exploring what is possible when the evocative capacity of language is given expression beyond the imposition of grammatical order, social transcriptions, or cultural restrictions. Not only does The Writer (O Escritor) expand our limited understanding of writing, and illuminate the potential of Hatherly's vibrant hand beautifully unfolding across various pictograms, but it also builds upon all the obsessions of one of the 20th century's most fascinating Portuguese poets. Fifty years since its first publication, The Writer (O Escritor), originally printed by the Portuguese publishing house Moraes Editores in 1975, reprinted by Hysterical Books, is a landmark in the history of visual poetry.