Rita Tormenta
- Portugal -
Rita Tormenta is a Portuguese author and cultural activist, known for her intense writing and raw exploration of the human experience. She was born in 1970 in Porto and grew up in Lisbon. She currently lives in Almada.
She holds a degree in Theatre from the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (ESTC) and studied at the Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa (FLUL). She has been dedicated to arts education since 1994, devising and coordinating projects in the fields of culture and education.
She has three published books: Centrifugar Angústias a 1600rpm (2022), O Pequeníssimo Livro de TI (2023) and Jugular Exposta ( The Poets and Dragons Society, 2025). Her poems have appeared in various publications, from Revista Incomunidade to Oresteia, Fluir and, more recently, Quiasmo, and several anthologies in Portugal and other countries, Sweden, UK, among others. Her poetry is described as a blend of the sublime with the grotesque.
Rita Tormenta maintains an active presence on the cultural scene, including participation in poetry talks, literary gatherings, and national and international festivals. She was a finalist for the Glória de Sant’Anna Prize in 2026, with the book “Jugular Exposta” (The Poets and Dragons Society 2025). She recently became a bookseller and has been leading the Misericórdia Literary Choir since March 2026.
‘JUGULAR EXPOSTA’ by RITA TORMENTA
‘Jugular Exposta’ is not just another book of contemporary Portuguese poetry; it is a literary sensation, an extraordinary surprise.
Its author, Rita Tormenta, is skilled at making the reader believe that she brings to each of the poems everything she is experiencing and feeling at the very moment of writing; and, with this skill, she creates an atmosphere of authenticity, almost of confessionalism, which draws the reader into the written page, which seems to be more well than plain, more vertigo than reflection. And yet, it is not so, because this writing – powerful and intentionally paradoxical, excessive and restrained, unrestrained and subtle, visceral and tender, of contingency and essence, bearing the age-old questions of the human and contemporary condition, influenced yet original – is painstakingly crafted and conceived, as attested by the various Poetic Arts contained within the book.
Rita is a collector of materials and whispers from days and nights, dirty and clean, personal and collective, all converted into words that she accumulates carefully, yet also in a careless regurgitation; and it is from this accumulation, ground in the mortar of her many readings, experiences and imaginings, that she draws the clay with which she shapes the body of the poem, with its jugular provocatively exposed to the blow. Is what she writes true? It is the truth of the poem, a perfect acrobatic leap from the lived to the written, all that is needed for poetry. In that sense, old Novalis is still right (“Poetry is the authentic real, the absolute. The more poetic, the more true”).
Everything in this book, so disruptive to peaceful days, is in its place, imagine that. The eternal feminine of screamed desire and of small yet great existential catastrophes echoes in the influences and presences dropped as if by chance – Virginia Woolf, Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Alfonsina Storni, Ophelia, Margaret, Penelope, Medea, Antoinette… – and finds its perfect embodiment on the cover, in a sculpture by Camille Claudel; there is no jugular more exposed. But do not think that they have the exclusive right to this; far from it, for Cortázar, Jim Morrison, Alberto Caeiro, who would have thought, Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno, Lipovetsky and others are summoned or leave their mark in this collection of scenes from the age of emptiness, of bombings and of the misery piled up in stations, in the city, the age of Ubers.
And poetry, which is not yet impossible, will never be impossible, claiming the stage, the loud voice, Rita’s book, a quilt woven by the spider who mistook weaving for weaving destiny.
“One day I was a spider and I mistook weaving for weaving destiny.
I wanted to weave quilts; I didn’t know how to weave traps.”
Elisa Costa Pinto, Portuguese writer, teacher and critic
Poetry
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To the Rescue / Nada temam
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XXXV / XXXV
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Rehearsal for a love poem. / Ensaio para poema de amor.
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Let’s ignore the world / Ignoremos o mundo
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Jacarandas / Jacarandás
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Whole sentences still in her memory / Palavras ainda no colo
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Treat us to a little poem / Brinda-nos com um pequeno poema
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I want to take you by the hand to that deep cold place where my monsters live / Quero levar-te mão até ao Lugar frio e escuro onde moram os meus monstros
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Bring me a poet or two. / Tragam-me um ou dois poetas
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Perhaps if there was a cliff in you / Se existisse em ti
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Blindfolded on the highway / Vendada na autoestrada
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Ego trip / Gesta egóica
