Cover design for Uçá, a book of poems by Aline Monteiro published by Toma Aí Um Poema in 2025.

The name is the creature. The uçá is the mangrove crab, and the book is organised in four parts that follow its cycle — Tide, Exoskeleton, Ecdysis, Soft Flesh. The cover turns the title into the animal: the U and the Á rise like the two claws, the diaeresis of the Ç becomes the eyes, the cedilla becomes the mouth, and the eight legs sprout from the bodies of the letters. The author's name curves along one claw, as if written on the shell. Lettering that is, at once, word and illustration.

Two colours, raw paper. Wine-red on sand — the colour of the mangrove and the mud, the colour of the shell. The square format lets the crab occupy the whole field, without hierarchy, like a coat of arms. The TAUP colophon sits discreetly to the side, in the place where the creature isn't.

Inside, the shoal. The interior art repeats the crab in a row, positive and negative — wine on sand and sand on wine — like the tide that rises and falls. The flap carries a poem from the book ("I ascend as a crab / soft within / hard without / wary / walks sideways"); the back cover opens with the question that runs through the book: of how many deaths is a life made?