Leonardo Bastião, The Illiterate Poet

In Itapetim’s countryside, deep inside Sertão do Pajeú in the Pernambuco backlands lives Leonardo Bastião in a rammed earth housing, a poet who, even without knowing how to read or write, built through his improvised metrical poetry and his relationship with the local environment an overwhelming cultural universe. After a lifetime of anonymity, videos of Leonardo declaiming authorial verses surfaced online and reached millions of views and even gave birth to a book transcribed by fans. In 2019, ...