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.”