There are writers who arrive at language as one arrives at a destination—deliberately, methodically, with the quiet assurance of those who believe meaning can be secured. And then there are those, rarer perhaps, who encounter language as one encounters a fracture: unexpectedly, almost accidentally, as if the word itself had opened beneath their feet. Leonardo Sousa belongs unmistakably to this second lineage. His work does not seek to resolve the world but to inhabit its instability, to speak from within that tremor where certainty dissolves and something more elusive begins.
His first encounter with poetry, as he recalls, was neither institutional nor guided, but intimate and almost clandestine: a handful of verses discovered in his mother’s notebook, lines that seemed to emerge from the anonymous depths of oral tradition, playful and unsettling at once. From that moment, poetry was not a discipline but a presence—diffuse, ambient, embedded in the very texture of life in São Miguel. It lived in improvised verses, in challenge songs, in the subtle distortions of everyday speech. Language, already then, revealed itself as something alive, something that exceeded intention.
Yet if the island offered him this primordial contact with the poetic, it was music—particularly Portuguese hip-hop—that first gave him a sense of voice. The emergence of artists like Sandro G, whose words echoed the geography of his own lived experience, and the sonic force of bands like Da Weasel, impressed upon him the idea that language could be immediate, situated, and yet expansive. Literature, in the stricter sense, would come later, arriving not as a foundation but as a complication: Herberto Hélder, Al Berto, Ramos Rosa—names that would deepen the field rather than define it.
There is, in Sousa’s recollection, a quiet resistance to the mythology of literary precocity. He did not grow up reciting Homer, nor was he nurtured within a household that revered poetry. On the contrary, his father’s skepticism toward poets seems to have created, if anything, a productive tension—a space in which writing could emerge not as inheritance but as defiance, or perhaps as necessity.
“I write,” he suggests, “because I cannot do other things.” It is a disarmingly simple statement, but one that reveals a deeper truth: writing, for Sousa, is not an expression of mastery but of limitation. It is the medium that remains when others—painting, music, composition—are unavailable. And yet, paradoxically, it is through this limitation that his work attains its breadth. Words become not merely tools, but instruments of exploration, fragile yet indispensable.
To ask whether he is a poet or a thinker is, in his view, to misunderstand the nature of the act itself. The distinction collapses under scrutiny. Where does reason end and emotion begin? The very question presumes a division that experience does not sustain. Writing, for Sousa, occurs precisely in that zone where such binaries dissolve—where thought feels and feeling thinks, where language becomes the site of their convergence.
This refusal extends to the enduring cliché of the suffering artist. Sousa dismantles it with a clarity that borders on severity. Writing, he insists, is not suffering. It is labor, certainly—time-consuming, demanding, often solitary—but it is also a privilege. To call it “painful” is to indulge in a rhetoric that obscures more than it reveals. There are, he reminds us, forms of suffering that far exceed the symbolic struggles of the page. The poet who performs anguish risks transforming it into spectacle, into a kind of aestheticized vanity.
And yet, his work is not without darkness. On the contrary, it is suffused with it—but a darkness that arises not from posture, but from perception. Echoing the austere lucidity of José Saramago, Sousa acknowledges that the world, as it stands, does not permit naïve illumination. To write lightly, in such a context, would be to falsify. If there is light in his work, it is a light that emerges through shadow, never in spite of it.
The process of writing, as he describes it, resists linearity. It does not begin with themes or ideas, but with fragments—lines that appear unbidden, carrying within them a rhythm, a cadence, a direction. These fragments are pursued, expanded, dismantled, rewritten. The final poem often bears little resemblance to its origin, as if the act of writing were itself a process of estrangement, a movement away from the initial impulse toward something less predictable, more precise.
Underlying this process is a profound awareness of language’s instability. At some point, he notes, one realizes that to say “now” is already to refer to what has passed, that the very act of naming introduces a delay, a displacement. Language, in this sense, is always out of sync with reality. It gestures toward presence, but can never fully coincide with it. Writing, then, becomes an engagement with this gap—a way of inhabiting what he calls the “tectonic fault” at the heart of expression.
This awareness informs his evolving relationship with his own work. The reissue of caderno de mitos pessoais is not, for him, a simple return, but a reconfiguration. The inclusion of the “apocryphal” poems—texts once excluded, now reworked—underscores the idea that writing is never complete, that every text remains open to revision, to displacement, to transformation. The book becomes not a fixed object, but a living archive of its own incompleteness.
At the center of this reissue lies, perhaps unexpectedly, the theme of friendship. Not as sentiment, but as structure. The book emerges from a network of relationships—editors, artists, collaborators—whose contributions shape its existence. In a literary culture often dominated by individualism, this emphasis on collective effort feels both modest and radical.
If identity enters Sousa’s work, it does so without the comfort of stability. He resists the reduction of Azorean identity to a set of recognizable markers—pineapples, accents, the lyricism of whales and lava. Such images, he suggests, risk turning lived experience into spectacle, into something consumable and inert.
Instead, he proposes an identity in motion—plural, shifting, irreducible. The island, in this sense, is not a closed space but a point of departure, a site of tension between the local and the global. It is both intensely specific and fundamentally open, a place where the minute and the cosmic intersect.
This tension extends to his reflections on art and its place within contemporary society. He is wary of the language of “consumption,” of the tendency to treat art as a product to be acquired rather than an experience to be lived. Against this logic, he insists on a more intimate engagement—one that resists commodification, even as it acknowledges the economic realities that shape cultural production.
His critique of cultural policy in the Azores reflects a similar concern. There is, he suggests, a persistent gap between production and audience, a lack of coherent strategy that prevents the full realization of the archipelago’s creative potential. The challenge is not merely to produce more, but to connect—to create conditions in which art can circulate, resonate, and transform.
And yet, despite these structural concerns, his gaze remains anchored in the present moment—a moment he describes not with despair, but with a kind of lucid fascination. The world, he acknowledges, is marked by violence, instability, ecological collapse, the resurgence of authoritarianism. But it is also the world we inhabit, the only one we can respond to. To reduce this complexity to a posture of anguish would be, in his view, to betray it.
“I feel alive,” he says, almost in passing. And in that statement, understated yet profound, one senses the core of his poetics. Not fulfillment, not wisdom, not resolution—but aliveness: precarious, incomplete, and therefore irreducibly real.
If there is a lesson in his work, it is perhaps this: that poetry does not exist to clarify the world, but to deepen its mystery. That it does not resolve contradictions, but reveals them. That it does not offer answers, but sustains the question.
And in that sustained uncertainty—in that refusal to settle, to conclude, to become fixed—Leonardo Sousa’s voice finds its singular clarity.
Diniz Borges
Based on an amazing interview in Portuguese in the fabulous project Compleexo N
Filamentos (artes e letras) 