Bodies blessed in heavy metal

Corpos blesidos em metal amarelo won the 2022 Sesc Literature Award in the Short Stories category.

In the eleven short stories that make up Corpos benzidos em metal grosso , Pedro Augusto Baía's debut book, the narrative unit that unites them is the experiences of the northern region of Brazil, in all its facets: the forest, the indigenous people, industrialization, the precariousness of cities, violence against the disadvantaged, inequality, communion with nature.

The protagonists are a mining victim, an immigrant from the North who is mistaken for a Bolivian in Europe, a reporter investigating a quilombola victim, a photographer suffering a panic attack in a flooded city, a massacre at a polling station within an indigenous village, a man contaminated by heavy metal from mining, among others. However, although the stories in Corpos benzidos em metal grosso are full of conflict and violence, it is the relationships of affection, the bonds that weave resistance, that are evident, and can contain such tenderness and innocence, as when a girl, in the story "Carne de boi," feels the urge to ask her brother "how a clean river manages to live within such a small word."

In the blurb, Natalia Borges Polesso and Paulo Scott write:

"We feel compelled to ask how so many hypnotic images manage to fit, and with such power, into these eleven short stories. The diversity of narrators and forms spreads through a fast-paced, well-constructed prose. An author who inspires with his mastery of the simplicity and subtext essential to good narratives, especially those that rely on the unrevealed. The managed places and the time that integrates expectations and subjectivities are fascinating. Pedro has good solutions for his stories; in his writing, we also discover the power of estrangement, the otherness he knows how to invite, but which, because it is literature and art, is never exhausted."