Most often remembered for his love verses, Vinicius de Moraes has always cultivated an appreciation for the ugly and the grotesque. Not that one characteristic excludes the other – in his poetry, the beautiful and the morbid go hand in hand. These 50 macabre poems present to the reader a facet that marks the poet's entire production, but has rarely been highlighted as one of the main attributes of his work.
From cemeteries to concentration camps, walking among ghosts or decomposed bodies, here is the funereal and eschatological Vinicius, the one who can be considered, "with due attention, the main heir in the 20th century of the grotesque poetry carried out by Cruz e Sousa and Augusto dos Anjos", as written by Daniel Gil, who organizes the selection and signs the afterword.
With a special graphic design and illustrated by Alex Cerveny, the anthology also includes seven unpublished poems, extracted from documents from the Archive-Museum of Brazilian Literature (AMLB) of the Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation: "A morte sem toll", "A consummação da carne" ", "Birthday poem", "Hungry face", "Parable of the rich man", "Disappearance of Tenório Júnior" and "The sordid".
