Rita Gomes returns to poetry with A Bicicleta Açoriana (“The Azorean Bicycle”), her second collection of poems, to be presented on February 21, 2026, at 3:00 p.m., at Livraria Letras Lavadas, in Ponta Delgada, the 2026 Portuguese Capital of Culture.

The launch will feature an exhibition of illustrations by Urbano and a presentation by Ana Oliveira. Additional book events on mainland Portugal are expected to be announced in the coming months.

A Journey in Motion

A Bicicleta Açoriana proposes both a physical and symbolic crossing—through landscape, memory, and introspection—with the bicycle as its central axis of movement, contemplation, and meaning. The new volume follows Gomes’s debut collection, Corações que Correm, Cabeças que Amam (“Hearts That Run, Heads That Love”), and deepens a writing practice shaped by the interplay between language, freedom, and self-knowledge.

Here, travel and return become poetic architecture. The body that pedals becomes a body that observes, feels, and writes. The bicycle ceases to be merely a mode of transportation; it becomes metaphor—linking landscape and thought, struggle and wonder, rhythm and breath.

The poems move as wheels do: forward, steady, attentive. Time slows. Space opens. The island expands between green and blue, wind and salt, physical fatigue and awakened mind. Language itself adopts this cadence, carrying the reader along winding roads where silence stretches and perception sharpens.

“There are places that, as soon as we arrive, we recognize as ‘home,’” Gomes reflects. “That’s how I feel in the Azores, particularly in São Miguel, the island where my sister lives. It’s a place where I live more fully who I am—or at least who I dream of being: poetry and freedom.”

Her sense of tempo mirrors the motion of the bicycle: “My time likes to move at the pace of a bicycle—not too slow, not too fast. That’s how I pedal the islands, one by one. With time to sow, to practice full attention, to listen to music, to embrace silence, to encounter nature, to be astonished, to gather, to share. It is in this perfect symbiosis—between what the pedal gives and what the senses receive and return, between pauses and advances—that poetry is felt, seen, read, written, lived more fully.”

A Dialogue of Image and Word

The book’s visual dimension plays an equally vital role. Urbano’s illustrations construct their own parallel narrative. Built from layers of color, transparency, flora, and fauna, the images expand meaning, extend silences, and create spaces of breath within the book—reinforcing the sensory nature of the journey Gomes proposes.

The collaboration, she explains, feels almost predestined. During a cycling trip on São Miguel in 2019, she encountered Urbano’s exhibition Tempus Edax Rerum. “It felt as though I had stepped into the lines and colors of my own pedal strokes, my own poetry,” she recalls. The exhibition’s title—Latin for “Time, the devourer of all things,” drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—now feels prophetic. “What is this book,” she asks, “if not a metamorphosis? From journey to book. From movement to poem and image.”

The foreword is written by Cátia Oliveira—known artistically as A Garota Não—whose voice Gomes describes as one of restlessness and transformation. “She is the voice of my—of our—disquiet. She carries the island’s sense of time: transformative. Sometimes she opens light within grayness; sometimes she exposes fog and rain beneath the sun. Her creation expresses the beauty of that freedom, that contrast. She always invites us to pedal, to act. Arrival is allowed—but only to recover and to love the quiet instant. There will always be another journey, another struggle. I pedaled, I pedal, on top of that beat. I want—we want—to perpetuate that song.”

Beyond the Bicycle

Though poetry marks a return to the page, Rita Gomes’s career has spanned diverse fields. She is the author of the educational DVD Brincofísico, dedicated to physical preparation methodologies for children and youth; the book Narrative as an Instrument of Research and Self-Knowledge; several scientific articles and book chapters; and co-author of EducVolei, focused on volleyball teaching methods.

Born in Porto in 1975, Gomes built her academic and professional life in sports science. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Faculty of Sport at the University of Porto and works as a physical education teacher, coach, trainer, and television commentator. Yet alongside a career grounded in precision and performance, she has long cultivated writing, music, and photography as spaces of emotional expression and personal reflection.

In A Bicicleta Açoriana, those parallel worlds converge. Science meets lyricism; discipline meets wonder. The road becomes a page. The island becomes a horizon. And the act of pedaling—steady, attentive, free—becomes a way of reading the world.

In Diário dos Açores-Paulo Viveiros-director