A Voice Across Oceans: Carlo Matos in Conversation

There are interviews, and then there are encounters that feel like books unfolding in real time. The recent transatlantic dialogue between Carlo Matos and Vamberto Freitas, published in multiple U.S. journals and translated into Portuguese for readers in the Azores, is unmistakably the latter: expansive, searching, and alive with the movement of thought.

What begins as a literary interview quickly becomes something more ambitious. It reads as a kind of polyphonic self-portrait, where questions do not merely prompt answers but open into meditations on identity, craft, memory, and the shifting ground between continents. As one reflection on the piece puts it, the exchange evolves into “a hybrid volume, part memoir, part poetics, part political meditation.” 

Freitas, long a central figure in Azorean and Luso-American literary criticism, approaches the conversation less as an interrogator and more as a collaborator. His questions invite narrative rather than summary, and Matos responds in kind, moving fluidly between personal history and artistic philosophy.

Throughout the interview, Matos returns to the idea of time as something unstable, even haunted. Fatherhood, memory, and artistic creation all seem to exist in overlapping temporalities, as if the present is always already being remembered from some future vantage point. This sense of dislocation becomes a key to understanding both his life and his work: a poetics rooted in simultaneity, where past and future coexist uneasily within the now.

It is within this shifting geography that Matos’s books take form. One of the most compelling moments in the interview arrives in the discussion of Doomsday, his work published with BlazeVOX [books]. Rather than treating apocalypse as spectacle or resolution, Matos reconfigures it as atmosphere, a condition of thought. The book resists what he describes as “conflict dramaturgy,” the expectation that narrative must be driven by escalating tension toward a decisive end. Instead, Doomsday inhabits a more uncertain space, where meaning is not resolved but continually made and unmade. 

What makes this interview particularly striking is how seamlessly it moves between these registers. A reflection on poetic form gives way to an anecdote about family; a discussion of diaspora opens into a critique of American political life. By the end, the conversation has expanded far beyond its initial frame, offering not simply insight into a body of work but a sustained meditation on how a life in literature is constructed.

For readers encountering Carlo Matos for the first time, the interview serves as an invitation into a complex and evolving body of work. For those already familiar with his writing, it offers something rarer: a glimpse of the thinking that underlies the books, the questions that continue to animate them, and the tensions that refuse resolution.


Read the whole interview here
https://filamentosarteseletras.art/2025/11/23/polyphony-across-the-atlantic-vamberto-freitas-in-dialogue-with-carlo-matos/

Read: Doomsday by Carlo Matos
https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/counting-sheep-till-doomsday-by-carlo-matos