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.