NEVES MARQUES, Isadora
Biography of a Fiction
Announcing a new After 8 Books publication – to end the year on a beautiful note –
I’d like to narrate myself through the lens of love.
And to be honest. What else
left to offer but the bravery of the little things
that mourn us; a transparency
neither aggrieved nor grateful.
Uncertainties kept in a diary.
Very happy to publish this new collection of poems by Isadora Neves Marques, wrapped under a star-flecked, stone-like cover:
– Biography of a Fiction –
Biography of a Fiction collects poems written between 2020 to 2025. These poems were written in a diaristic way, mostly in short form, while working on larger pieces, some of which also collected here or elsewhere. What started, seemingly, as notes on reproductive desire, gender, and sexuality soon matured into a meditation on the role of fiction in the exercise of writing (and idealizing) a biography, including the thorny aspect of artistic license and the uses of one’s own life and of others.
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“Memory, sex, illness, theory, tenderness, shame; accelerated together until they collapse as independent concepts. In Biography of a Fiction, Isadora Neves Marques writes the body as a porous entity, at once wounded and speculative, dense with hormones, ghosts, scars and futures that never fully deliver. I am not sure that it is correct to say that she ‘writes the body,’ yet she does not write ‘about’ the body: she writes with it, through it, against it, even beyond it. An I stands for the self in its form and meaning: I means ‘me’ and I figures a tall, slender person: her own I, body and mind together in a word, a letter, a caligram. Biography of a Fiction is a body made book.”
— Filipa Ramos
“I read this book in a gasp during a romantic down and the poems pushed me back to the world where I can believe in sex again and in the art that’s entwined in it. That makes it sound like these poems are ‘only’ erotic but that’s not the case at all. Formally, this book is a wonder of concision where poetry is the material through which an impossible ‘I’ moderates fiction’s and eroticism’s limits, like in these lines which I can’t forget:
representation of eroticism nullified by emotional intensity;
the blockage of streamed pornography/ all leading up to you.
A book to devour and to linger with. A book that scrutinizes writing (fiction?), abandons it, and always comes back to it, as a way of living.”
— Claire Star Finch
“Biography of a Fiction sets the fabrication of binaries and the pain of their forced severances against the gradients they purport to supersede, and watches them blend: she/he, mother/child, child/world, self/sex, body/other, flesh/diagnosis. With lean glimpses of language and narrative, Isadora Neves Marques upends the systems of categories we use to dress up what is actually boundless relation, stripping it down to reveal its raw negative spaces, full and naked.”
— Aiden Farrell
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Isadora Neves Marques is a poet, film director, and artist. They are the author of the poetry collections A Campa de Marx (Não Edições, 2025) and Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (Pântano Books, 2020). They published short story collections, such as Morrer na América (Kunsthalle Lissabon & Abysmo, 2017), and edited several projects on art and theory with Archive Books, Sternberg Press, and e-flux journal. Their films and artworks have been exhibited globally, from Semaine de la Critique and the International Film Festival Rotterdam to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and CA2M in Madrid. With artist Alice dos Reis, they co-founded the poetry press Pântano Books in 2020.
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Published with the support of FRAC Île-de-France, Paris, and Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli
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BIOGRAPHY OF A FICTION
12 x 18 cm, 142 pages, English
ISBN: 978-2-492650-18-5
Published by After 8 Books, 2025
Design by Marco Caroti
After 8 Editions / Poetry
