Poetics of the Anthropocene

Reflections on the Relationships Between the Human and the Non-Human in the Poetry of Prisca Agustoni and Sofia Mariutti

Abstract

Contemporary Brazilian poetry has increasingly emerged as fertile ground for questioning the boundaries established between the human and the nonhuman, particularly in response to the ecological urgencies of the Anthropocene. This study examines how the books Quimera (2025), by Prisca Agustoni, and Abrir a boca da cobra (2023), by Sofia Mariutti, develop poetic forms that unsettle the notion of human centrality by proposing modes of coexistence grounded in vulnerability and interspecies interdependence. The aim is to investigate how the poems by both authors articulate a critique of anthropocentric logic, whether through modes of sensitive proximity or through violence and the dissolution of corporeal boundaries. To do so, the research combines comparative poem analysis with ecocritical and posthuman theoretical frameworks informed by authors such as Donna Haraway (2013), Cary Wolfe (2010) and Anna Tsing (2022), who explore the displacement of the human and the emergence of post-anthropocenic perspectives. The findings suggest that, by decentering the human figure and exposing its impotence in the face of natural forces, the poems establish a poetic in which affection, language, and the body are reconfigured through coexistence and confrontation. Likewise, the analysis reveals that the nonhuman, in these works, is addressed through lenses of memory, extinction, and the struggle for existence and immanence. Thus, the poetry of Agustoni and Mariutti reaffirms its ethical and aesthetic role in shaping responses to the ecological crises of the present.