Category Archives: Brazil

Poem “I Know You by Your Scent” by Brazilian Poet Ricardo Aleixo

21 Sunday Sep 2025

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Brazilian Poet Ricardo Aleixo
Photo by Rafael Motta for Culturadoria (2022)

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.

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The Writer’s Life: An Easter Story

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Brazil, The Writer's Life

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Downtown Fortaleza – Northeast State of Ceará – Brazil

Today marks the beginning of Holy Week in the Christian Church calendar. During these seven days, the church commemorates Jesus’ triumphal arrival in Jerusalem (Palm Sunday), His betrayal (Wednesday), the Last Supper with his disciples (Maundy Thursday), crucifixion (Good Friday), and ends with His resurrection on Easter Sunday. When we dare to speak truth to power, retribution can be swift. It’s not easy to follow in His footsteps: To love one’s neighbor can come with risks to one’s safety and life. Sometimes, we may also lose what we hold dear.

In my short story “Rescued: An Easter Story,” the protagonist Dwayne Higgins, an innocent man caught up in a crime not of his making, is forced to examine the direction of his life. The story is inspired by a scary incident that occurred during the period we lived in Fortaleza, capital of the Northeastern State of Ceará in Brazil.

The year was 1990. At the time, I was working at a small family-owned international trade consultancy firm. On July 16th, sometime after 2:00 p.m., my estranged husband (hereafter called Husband) called me at the office. He had been robbed at gunpoint at the office of a local cambista (a black market foreign-exchange broker) with whom he worked in downtown Fortaleza buying and selling foreign currency. The bandits seized US dollars and Brazilian cruzeiros, amounting to over forty-one federal minimum salaries. My monthly salary as an import-export assistant was only two minimum salaries.

Several attempts to reach Husband failed. The cambista he worked with claimed that he knew nothing about Husband’s whereabouts. After leaving the office at 6:00 p.m., I picked up our five- and seven-year-old sons at school and told them what had happened to their father. We went to the apartment where Husband lived with his Brazilian amante (mistress). Also distraught, she had not heard from him since his call earlier that afternoon.

Fears of him being locked up in a Brazilian prison or, worse yet, “disappeared” by the police muddied my thoughts. The gravity of their father’s disappearance subdued the boys.

Our shared ordeal ended after nine o’clock that evening. Husband arrived in the company of two burly plainclothes police officers in search of the stolen money. Surprised to see me and the boys, one officer headed into the bedroom with Husband and his amante. The other officer remained with me and the kids in the living room.

In a polite manner, he questioned me about my name, where I lived, where I worked, our country of origin, how long we had been living in Fortaleza, our residential status, how long we were married, how long we were separated, and my relationship with my husband’s mistress. I assumed these questions were intended as verification of the information they had obtained from Husband—their major suspect of the theft. Our sons remained quiet and motionless, seated on the only sofa in the small space.

My sons and I did not get home until after ten o’clock that evening. We had missed a bullet. For now.

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Poem “Expropriation” by Brazilian Poet Rubens Jardim

23 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Rubens Jardim (1946-2024)
Photo Credit: Brazilian Editora Arribaçã

My Poetry Corner March 2025 features the poem “Expropriation / Expropriação” from the poetry collection Outside of the Bookshelf / Fora da Estante by Brazilian poet and journalist Rubens Jardim (1946-2024). Born in Vila Itambé in the interior of São Paulo, he was one of three siblings, with an older brother and younger sister. Poetry was always a part of his life. An aunt, passionate about poetry with a magnificent collection, would always recite Brazil’s renowned poets at family gatherings. He attributed his skill at public poetry readings to her.

In an interview with Revista Arte Brasileira, following the publication of his Anthology of Unpublished Poems / Antologia de Inéditos in 2018, he spoke a lot about poetry and its importance in his life.

“Poetry for me is alchemy. It is the transformation of the ignoble into the noble, of the invisible into the visible, of the unspeakable into utterance….

I believe that true poetry increases humanity in man. It shows that if there is a flower, there is also hunger…. Furthermore, poetry is a constant struggle against alienation. It’s nonconformity. Indignation…. What’s more, poetry does not bend to anything. Averse to classification and closed thinking to transformation, poetry does not tolerate dictatorship—not even dictatorship of the word…. It’s also a way of living. It’s an attitude towards and within life. And if I continue writing poems—even knowing that poetry is useless—as the poet Manoel de Barros enlighteningly said—it’s because I like to believe that, thanks to poetry, I have kept the flame of hope for transformation alive.

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Poem “Intolerance” by Brazilian Poet João Doederlein @akapoeta

22 Sunday Sep 2024

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Brazilian Poet João Doederlein @akapoeta
Photo Credit: Poet’s Instagram Account

My Poetry Corner September 2024 features the poem “intolerance / intolerância” by Brazil’s young poet João Doederlein, writing under the pseudonym @akapoeta, from his bestselling debut poetry collection O Livro dos Ressignificados / The Book of Resignifications, published in 2017.

Born in 1996 in Brasília, the federal capital of Brazil, João began writing poetry at eleven years old. At fourteen, he started his first blog with his own texts. Then, two years later, he created an Instagram account where he began sharing his poems, together with his own illustrations.

While studying Advertising and Publicity at the University of Brasília (2015-2020), Doederlein created the Resignifications project in which he attributes new meanings to words. Based on the personal experiences of his generation, the poet, then nineteen years old, gave more weight to the objectivity of dictionaries with his poetic reinterpretations of nouns (n), adjectives (adj), and verbs (vt). In less than a year, his experiment spread across the internet, gaining thousands of followers on Facebook and Instagram.

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Poem “porto alegre, 2016” by Brazilian Poet Angélica Freitas

23 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Angélica Freitas
Photo Credit: Dirk Skiba / Companhia das Letras, Brazil

In my Poetry Corner June 2024, featuring a Brazilian poet, I would like to call attention to a climate change disaster that struck the people of Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.

The contemporary poet and translator Angélica Freitas is no newcomer to my Poetry Corner. In May 2019, I featured her poem “the woman is a construction” from her poetry collection a uterus is the size of a fist / um útero é do tamanho de um punho (2012). This month’s featured poem “porto alegre, 2016” is from her third collection Songs of Torment / Canções de Atormentar (2020). In this collection, she takes a wider view of injustice, machismo, and her disillusion with the Brazilian dream that’s still out of reach for the majority.

Born in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1973, Angélica Freitas began writing poetry at the age of nine, but her journey to finding herself as a poet took a long and circuitous route. Her discovery, at fifteen years, that she was gay made it difficult to fit in with her peers. Bullies found her and easy target. Then, her father’s sudden death when she was eighteen upended her dream to study in Glasgow, where she spent six months with a Scottish girlfriend.

With her mother’s insistence that she earn a university degree, she opted to pursue a career in journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. She remained in the capital after graduation, where she could be invisible. In 2000, an unexpected acceptance as a trainee with O Estado de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, led her to the metropolis of São Paulo.

Freitas confessed that she wasn’t a good reporter, but that the experience exposed her to the other realities of life. During a period of depression in 2005, she attended a poetry workshop conducted by Carlito Azevedo, a poet from Rio de Janeiro, that changed the course of her life. At 31 years old, she realized she was on the wrong path. During an interview for the Public Library of Paraná, she said:

“Okay, I want to write, but it’s not journalism, it’s poetry. You see, that was in my face the whole time. It was what I had been doing since I was little. So that’s it. Best to quit my job and dedicate myself to literature. I called my mother and said I was thinking about spending time in Pelotas. She supported me. Six months later, I resigned, handed over my apartment. Then I returned to Pelotas to organize and finish writing what became my first book, which was called Rilke shake.”

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Poem “Certainties” by Brazilian Poet Mário Quintana

17 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Mário Quintana (1966)
Photo Credit: Correio da Manhã (Posted on Wikipedia)

My Poetry Corner March 2024 features the poem “Certainties / Certezas” by Brazilian poet, writer, and translator Mário Quintana (1906-1994). Known as the poet of “simple things,” Quintana shares his beliefs on love and friendship for making our lives worthwhile. Though unable to determine the publication date of this poem, I get the sense that it was written at a later stage in his life. In a change to my normal presentation, I intersperse excerpts of this poem with the poet’s lifelong journey to becoming a beloved and acclaimed poet in his state and across Brazil.

I don’t want someone who dies of love for me…
I just need someone who lives for me, who wants to be with me, hugging me.

Born in the municipality of Alegrete in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, Quintana was the third child: a son of a pharmacist and grandson of doctors. At the age of seven, with the help of his parents, he learned to read using the local newspaper as a primer. His parents also initiated his studies in French and Spanish. After he completed elementary school in his hometown, his father enrolled him as a boarding student at the Military College in the state capital, Porto Alegre.

I don’t demand that someone loves me like I love them, I just want them to love me, no matter with what intensity.
I don’t assume that everyone I like likes me…

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“For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” by Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi

18 Sunday Jun 2023

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Brazilian Poet Eli Macuxi
Photo Credit: Blog Elimacuxi, Pure Poetry

My Poetry Corner June 2023 features the poem “For Your Hypocrisy With a Kiss” (Pra Sua Hipocrisia Com Um Beijo) by Brazilian poet, photographer, historian, and teacher Elisangela Martins, who self-identifies as Eli Macuxi or Elimacuxi. She teaches History and Art Criticism in the Visual Arts Course at the Federal University of Roraima with special interest in feminism and gender identity/orientation. As a historian and photographer, she has partnered with the Association of Transvestites and Transexuals of Roraima in fighting for human rights.

Born in 1973 in the City of São Paulo, she grew up in a favela on the periphery where, for the first ten years of her life, she faced hunger and begged on the streets. Her semi-illiterate father, from the Northeastern State of Ceará, taught her to read and write. With a childhood fascination for verse and encouraged by a teacher, she began writing poetry in fifth grade. At fifteen, she dreamed of having her work read and studied by others:

“But the desire was totally blunted by the pessimistic awareness of reality,” confides the poet on her blog. “I was a skinny teenager, without luck of getting a job, studying at night school on the periphery, ‘daughter of a drunkie,’ with lots of younger siblings. To be a writer? Poet? It was laughable.”

In 1990, as a seventeen-year-old night school student and receptionist at a pharmacy during the day, she married a much older man. Giving birth to triplets soon after did not bode well for their marriage. Before the triplet’s second birthday, her husband had had enough and left them. A divorcee and back home with her parents, she worked for two years at several part-time jobs before securing a steady job as a waitress at a high-end restaurant. 

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Poem “A Dream” by Brazilian Poet Sérgio Vaz

19 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Sérgio Vaz
Photo Credit: Laysla Vasconcelos

My Poetry Corner March 2023 features the poem “A Dream” (Um Sonho) by Brazilian poet, writer, and cultural agitator Sérgio Vaz from his 2007 poetry collection Stone Collector (Colecionador de Pedras). He is known across Brazil as the “Poet of the Periphery.” Born in 1964 in Ladainha in the interior of the southeastern State of Minas Gerais, he was five years old when he moved with his family to Taboão da Serra in the outskirts of the City of São Paulo where he completed high school.

With his father’s encouragement, Sérgio developed a reading habit from an early age. He grew up roaming the back streets of the city, observing its cultural roots, habits, and customs. After an invitation to write lyrics for friends who had a musical band, he began exploring poetry. During an interview with Katia Marko and Fabiana Reinholz for Brasil de Fato in November 2021, Sérgio said:

“Poetry for me is when it comes down from the pedestal and kisses the feet of the community. I had to take off that elegant outfit, that sophisticated word. Poetry presented itself like this, in a humble way for me, fighting against the [military] dictatorship [1964-1985], against tyranny. That’s how I became interested in poetry, knowing that it could be an instrument of struggle through words.”

Taboão da Serra – Greater São Paulo – Brazil
Photo Credit: Zé Barretta

During the same interview, Sérgio said that his poem, “Stubbornness” (Teimosia), defines him a lot because one must be stubborn to be Brazilian today.

It is of no use
should they break my legs
pierce my eyes
or talk behind my back.
What sustains my body
are my ideas.
Arms uncrossed,
I have a brain with wings
and I am all heart.
If they should forbid me to walk on water,
I swim over the land.
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Poem “After” by Brazilian Poet Martha Medeiros

18 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Martha Medeiros
Photo Credit: Martha Medeiros Official Facebook Page

My Poetry Corner September 2022 features the poem “After” (Depois) by Brazilian poet, journalist, and chronicler Martha Medeiros, born in 1961 in Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southern State of Rio Grande do Sul. With more than thirty books published, many of which have been adapted for theater, TV, and the cinema, she has become one of the most read and respected writers in Brazil.

In the 1980s, after graduating in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Medeiros started out as a copywriter and content creator in advertising and marketing. Her debut poetry collection Strip-Tease, published in 1985, received great success. Over the next sixteen years, ending in 2001, she published five more books of poetry. Her favored themes were love, lovelessness, and relationships.

In the poem “The measuring tape of love,” she concludes: It’s not height, weight, or muscles that make a person great. / It’s their immeasurable sensitivity.

The extensive list in the poem “What is the purpose of a relationship?” includes:

A relationship has to serve you in feeling 100% comfortable with the other person…
To teach one to trust, to respect the differences that exist between people…
A relationship has to serve for one to forgive the weaknesses of the other…
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“Identity” – Poem by Afro-Brazilian Poet Ryane Leão

20 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Afro-Brazilian Poet Ryane Leão
Photo Credit: Poet’s Facebook Page

My Poetry Corner March 2022 features the poem “Identity” (Identidade) from the 2017 debut poetry collection Everything in Her Shines and Burns: Poems of Struggle and Love (Tudo Nela Brilha e Queima: Poemas de Luta e Amor) by Afro-Brazilian poet Ryane Leão. A lesbian and English language teacher, born in 1989 in Cuiabá, capital of the Center-West State of Mato Grosso, Ryane moved to São Paulo where she studied literature at the Federal University of São Paulo. Considered one of the most representative militants of Brazilian poetry today, Ryane’s poems speak mainly about female empowerment, social inequality, and the struggle against racism.

Influenced by her poetry-loving parents, Ryane grew up with a fascination for literature and began writing as a child. But she never saw herself in the stories of Brazil’s famous poets, mostly white males. That changed when she moved to São Paulo. With exposure to poetry by black women, she discovered another type of poetry that spoke to her life experience.

Her journey to penning her own stories were strewn with shards of glass, as shared in the following autobiographical poem:

how many times my mother sat on the edge of the bed
and helped me remove the shards of glass from my feet
and said few would deserve my love
that the world would hurt me because I was born
with too much heart
that I had to stop being so good
or I would have nothing left
beyond the shards
that she pulled out
with care and patience
planting flowers
in their place
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