Bringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible…mehr
Bringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line. The book's title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed. Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.
Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Todo en el ahora (2015), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), and Mirrors for Gold (2006); as well as art and media histories that include Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019), National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009). The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), he is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.
Inhaltsangabe
1. Desierto de Chihuahua Hangman 3 Macula 5 Night Festival 7 January Song 10 2. Orphan Hill, Presidio County Lung Compliance 15 Litany 17 Remainder 19 Ordinance 21 Speaking Part 23 Citizen 25 Witness 26 Grassland 28 Vehicle 31 Immune 33 Residence 35 Grayscale 36 In Person 38 3. Milestone Obelisk Carbonate of Copper 43 Impasse 45 Anyway 47 Oxygen 50 Palisade 52 September 54 Congregation 56 Chanting 58 Throne 60 February Sketchbook 63 4. Sign for Bridge Fable 67 5. Bicentennial Boulevard Field Guide 85 Pathway 88 Swerve 90 Time to Wake Michael 92 Time Insufficient 95 Wind 97 Messenger 99 Warning 100 Tunnel 102 Touchstone 105 Season 108 6. Puente Brownsville-Matamoros Cover 113 Room 115 Facsimile 117 Thread Time 119 Embargo 120 Entrance 122 Legion 126 Oblation 128 Particle 131 Renegade 134 Scorpion 136 Birthright 138 Song 139 The Color 141 List of Figures 143 Postscript 145 Notes 147 Acknowledgments 149
