From house tometropolis: the lyric subject and the reconfiguration of address in the poetics of Lobo Damasceno

Abstract

This article analyzes the constitution of the lyric subject in Casa do Norte (2020), a work by Rodrigo Lobo Damasceno, at the intersection of individual memory and collective experience. Damasceno’s poetry, marked by spatial mobility between Brazil’s Northeast and Southeast regions, is defined by Ranieri (2020) as a “migrant aesthetics” that reorganizes Brazilian geography by exploring the feelings of exile and precarity experienced by Northeastern migrants. Drawing on the relationship between lyricism and autobiography, the article examines the tensions between the autobiographical “I” and the fictional poetic subject, which dissolves and reconstitutes itself within the text. The study also addresses lyric address, revealing the ambiguity in the relationship among “I,” “you,” and “we,” which mobilizes the reader as an active participant in the discourse. Damasceno thus creates a singular poetics that articulates the intimate and the collective, connecting personal memories to marginalized voices within contemporary urban space.