(“I don’t believe in bad boys”: Homoerotic autofiguration in Osvaldo Bossi’s poetry)

Abstract

Osvaldo Bossi´s lyrical career, which started twenty years before, changes with “El muchacho de los helados y otros poemas” (2006) (The boy of the ice-cream and other poems). The “masks” by which the lyrical speaker was covered in the previous book poems – the coyote in Del coyote al correcaminos (Coyote and the Road Runner), written in 1988 and released in 2007, the character of Hamlet in Fiel a una sombra (faithfull to a shadow) 2001-, went over to an  “I” that assumes  without stridencies, by means of a simple language and a close rhythm, at a time, to the prose. Parallel to this statement -and in close relationship-, a series of marginal characters begin to populate the poems of Bossi, the “Los chicos malos” of his latest anthology (Bad Boys, 2012). These are always pondered by the speaker, another of those inhabitants of the borders, according to what the boy of the ice-creams tells us.
In this work, we propose a review of Bossi´s lyrical trajectory in relation to its context of appearance (the 90s), and an approach to his poetry to study how it has been transformed until, the recovery and vindicate of those subaltern subjectivities through homoeroticism in his last book. This itinerary, in which autobiographical elements are gradually incorporated, it can be read as a strategy of auto-figuration, that is, of construction and projection of an image (fictional, but with referential elements) by the author.