Book, Total Poetry (Waly Salomão)[LS]

Waly Salomão was one of the most fertile and heterogeneous figures of the Brazilian avant-garde. It is no surprise that Caetano Veloso, in a song dedicated to him, says: “your mark on the earth shines [...] and the shine is not small”. Baiano, son of a Syrian and a sertaneja, Waly was the spearhead of a generation of poets who - in a movement of resistance to censorship - contradicted the formal principles of tradition and thought of literary production based on its articulation with other arts, which contributed to his writing being so permeable to the various manifestations of the restless cultural scene in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. His verses continued to reinvent themselves throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and consolidated his role as a multiple poet in books such as Algaravias, released in 1996 . Poesia Total brings together for the first time the complete poetic work of Waly Salomão, from Me Segura que eu vou dar um section, from 1972, to Pescados vivo, from 2004. The volume also includes a section of previously unpublished songs in a book, as well as an appendix with the most relevant texts about his work, written by names such as Antonio Cícero, Francisco Alvim and Davi Arrigucci Jr. In Gigolo de Bibelôs, his second book, the following verse echoes: “I have a hunger to become everything I am not”. This desire to abolish borders and confront limits - between self and other, between prose and lyric, between art and life - is one of the main hallmarks of Waly Salomão's work. Total poetry is a journey of no return: an “incessant process of poetic searches”, as the author himself said about his poetic-visual work, Babilaques.