Matheus De Toni writes in Portuguese, and in 2025 he published two books with Editora Inverso: a collection of stories, Yve e outros contos, and a book of poems, Poesia de curta duração. Alongside them he keeps Enquanto é, a newsletter he calls “a space for reflection and pause,” where long and short texts, poems, stories and essays sit side by side. His own reason for doing it fits in a sentence: “For me, writing is a way of organising time, memory, desire, affection and subjectivity.”
The poems do not try to please. One is called “Minha poesia não é bonita”, my poetry is not pretty; others are titled “Já tive noites piores” (I’ve had worse nights) and “Tenho estado exausto” (I have been exhausted). He takes the hard parts of being a person seriously without dressing them up, and the psychology he studies seems to sit underneath that more as a conviction than as theory.
What runs through almost everything he writes is attention. On the coast he started looking at the ground, at seaweed in tide pools, a starfish, the rocks, and he photographs what he finds there. “Looking at things with attention has earned me a few good photos,” he writes, with some understatement. The same habit carries his longer pieces: a night spent next to an araucaria, set against the smallness of a person, and a reading of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace that he keeps in public, like a notebook.
Books
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Yve e outros contos · Stories and crônicas · 2025 · Editora Inverso · 86 pages
Stories that explore the limits of existence and the dilemmas of people caught between leaving and staying. -
Poesia de curta duração · Poetry · 2025 · Editora Inverso · 120 pages
Intense, unguarded poems that move through existential questions, inner pain and the difficult relationship with the world and with oneself.
A Poem
This poem from Poesia de curta duração appears in Portuguese and English in spazio magazine issue 01, Winter 2026.
Misturar palavras aos sentimentos
É uma tarefa árdua.
Conectar o íntimo da alma à coesão linguística,
Tal como enfrentar o frio de corpo nu,
Pode doer.
A gratificação final
De construir castelos poéticos
Salva-me do tédio rotineiro.
Assim, carrego comigo
A dádiva e o castigo da poesia.
Sou o escrivão da alma,
Minha missão é comunicar,
De dentro para fora,
Tudo que me é dito.To blend words with feelings
Is an arduous task.
To bind the soul’s most inner self to language’s cohesion,
Like facing the cold with naked skin,
Can hurt.
The final gratification
Of building poetic castles
Saves me from routine’s tedium.
And so I carry with me
The gift and the punishment of poetry.
I am the scribe of the soul,
My mission is to convey,
From the inside out,
All that is told to me.Read the feature in our journal
Matheus De Toni writes Enquanto é on Substack at matheusdetoni.substack.com and is on Instagram as @enquantoe.
