OCEAN MATTERS: IMAGE AND ARTIFACT IN ADALBER SALAS HERNÁNDEZ’S NUEVAS CARTAS NÁUTICAS (2022).

Nuevas cartas náukcas by the Venezuelan poet Adalber Salas Hernández (Pretextos, 2022) is a colleckon of prose poems related to the ocean. The author approaches this olen-wrimen-about topic experimentally, by blending fact and fickon, original and modified citakons, languages, and registers. In this arkcle, I focus on what I idenkfy as an archaeological impulse that runs through Nuevas cartas náuDcas. First, I analyze a seleckon of poems in which Salas draws the reader’s amenkon to material arkfacts, olen displayed in specific sites of colleckon and exhibikon. I then show how, parallel to these instances of display, Salas connects his museum objects to the marine oral tradikons that also populate the book, and I contrast his treatment of ankque documents and relics with his approach toward photographic images. Throughout, I argue that the presence of material objects throughout the book allows us to inscribe Nuevas cartas náuDcas within the “blue humanikes”: an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the cultural, social, and polikcal dimensions of human interackons with the ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]