Cláudia R. Sampaio - Já não me deito em pose de morrer

"I think of Cláudia R. Sampaio's poetry as a furious discourse that only someone of profound tenderness could deliver. Her tragedy, explicit and frontal, is that of knowing delicacy when everything around her tends towards the grotesque and her mind challenges itself in doubt. A magnificent poet, her impasse is constant: 'Who knows if it isn't now that / I possess all the madness / and become a woman // I who from the waist up am sad / and from there down a beach / where the sea exploded / only to then transform it into / man and into wonder as well.'

Cláudia R. Sampaio's expression is among the most forceful of contemporary times. It doesn't rise up as a pamphleteer; it rises up in an intimate urgency that she doesn't fear exposing, using her vulnerability for strength, like someone who maps wounds seeking to heal them, and also to glorify them, with verse." All poetry borders on therapy, and here therapy is fundamental, including as a way of classifying every detail of the world, as protest and as the joy of the possible. Madness and therapy are intimate and fertilize, at the same time, thought and wisdom.

What a marvel the unbridledness of this poetry. What a marvel that it is not very clean, very polite, and presents itself above all as a necessity beyond reason and any etiquette. A poetry that redeems so much but also gratefully infects: "from this life to the next / they punished us with embraces / drowning the hunchbacked farewell / advanced by the collisions of / words / blessed poison / of our home."

by Valter Hugo Mãe, curator of the "In Praise of Shadow" collection