My Poetry Corner September 2025 features the poem “I Know You by Your Scent / Conheço Vocês pelo Cheiro” from the poetry collection Too Heavy for the Wind: Poetic Anthology / Pesada Demais para a Ventania: Antología Poética (2018) by Ricardo Aleixo, Brazilian poet, essayist, and multimedia artist-performer.

Born in 1960 in Belo Horizonte, capital of the southeastern State of Minas Gerais, he is considered one of the most innovative Brazilian contemporary poets. His work is found in national and international collections. As a multimedia performer, he has presented his work across Brazil and overseas. He lives in Belo Horizonte and is a member of the Academy of Letters of Minas Gerais.

In his 2024 interview with Matheus Lopes Quirino for the Social Service of Commerce (SESC) of São Paulo, Aleixo credited his family as instrumental in shaping the person he is today. He describes his parents as two incredibly intelligent people, born in the early 1900s, not many years after the end of slavery in May 1888. Although his poor, working-class parents both lacked opportunities for furthering their education, they instilled in Ricardo and his older sister the value of education. His father, a soft-spoken man, sought to refine himself intellectually through reading Brazil’s great literary writers.

As a boy, Aleixo’s first love was music and later the visual arts in high school. He began writing his first poems and songs when he turned 17 and 18 years. As a soccer player at eighteen years, he wanted to become a professional. That dream ended when a ball struck and blinded him in his right eye. Poetry became his only option.

At nineteen years, he decided not to pursue a bachelor’s degree, after witnessing his sister’s disappointment in not graduating as a writer on completion of her BA in literature. Instead, he embarked on a self-study program through building a home library with his sister’s help. Around the age of 24 or 25, he studied literature, semiotics, music, visual arts, history, and philosophy.

His life change when the Belo Horizonte Public Library asked him to catalog 600 volumes of a private collection of books, covering African Brazilian culture and its transatlantic ramifications. He read them all. To him, this meant much more than an academic degree.

The featured poem, “I Know You by Your Scent,” caught my attention in the way it turns our social concept of bodily scent on its head. I know you by your scent acts as a refrain throughout the poem, stretched taut like a rope or chain in non-rhyming couplets with two to four/five words per line (Portuguese/English). For economy of space, I’ve taken the liberty to combine each sentence into a verse. Instead of 44 couplets, I’ve condensed the poem into eleven verses with five refrains.

[Note: English translation by Dan Hanrahan, published in the December 2018 issue of Words Without Borders.]

The opening verse establishes the persona of the poem:

I know you
by your scent,
by your clothes,
by your cars,
by your rings and,
of course,
by your love
of money.

The higher our income or earnings, we can pamper our bodies with high-end bodywash and skincare products, and our signature perfume. Smelling good indicates social refinement and a privileged lifestyle. Love of money defines the poetic personas’ behavior throughout the poem.

Aleixo makes clear in the second verse that the personas have inherited their wealth from some distant ancestor. For them, it’s an endless pursuit of self-enrichment (verse 3); an obsession that negates life:/ the asylum, the / cell, the border (verse 4).

Verse 5 reminds me that, over the years, the pain and suffering inflicted on humanity in pursuit of capital never ends. Only the people and locations targeted may vary.

I know you
by the scent
of pestilence and horror
that spreads
wherever you go
—I know you
by your love
of money.

The Church, too, is an accomplice (verse 6):

Under your love
of money,
God is a
father so cheap
he charges
for his miracles.

All the finest perfumes cannot mask the scent, / of sulfur… / which clings to / all that you touch (verse 7). Their ill-gotten gain brings neither inner joy nor peace. Rather, they respond / with loathing / to a smile, to pleasure, / to poetry (verse 8). Survival depends only on their love of money (verse 9).

Verse 10 reminds me of the billionaire pedophile and his international network of rich men who sexually abused teenage girls in a lucrative business across borders.

For the love
of money,
you turn even
your own daughters
to hard currency,
to pure gold.

The eleventh and final verse is an indictment of the super-rich of our world who never have enough money. Lacking morality, compassion, and empathy, they destroy lives as they grasp for more and ever more.

I know you
by your scent.
I know you
by the stench
of your rotting
corpse that
somehow
walks
for its love
of money.

To read the complete featured poem “I Know You by Your Scent / Conheço Vocês pelo Cheiro” and to learn more about the work of Ricardo Aleixo, go to my Poetry Corner September 2025.