Overview

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.

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9781531509705

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Reviews

The section titles of Tejada's intense, harrowing new book are derived from place names, as though the poems marked some sort of periplus, an account of a journey. And indeed, Tejada initiates a journey that begins in the familial and radiates into a world of 'missing through-lines, ' surveilled borders, of sequestrations and dispossessions. Perhaps more significantly, it is the kaleidoscopic originality of Tejada's language, its at once precise and vividly sensual chthonic glow, that lights the way for the reader's own journey by insistently 'propelling forward a hope.'---Forrest Gander, author of Mojave Ghost Tejada's Carbonate of Copper is valuable and needed, moving from place to perception to meditation, placing meaning and me-ness into a mediated space. His is a poetics of environment creation, where poems are molecular structures, made of the imagination, with an intent of mutual transfiguration.---Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Tejada's Carbonate of Copper is valuable and needed, moving from place to perception to meditation, placing meaning and me-ness into a mediated space. His is a poetics of environment creation, where poems are molecular structures, made of the imagination, with an intent of mutual transfiguration.---Hoa Nguyen

Author Information

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.

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