Full Description
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.
Contents
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
