Details

ISBN-10: 1632430762
ISBN-13: 9781632430762
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publish Date: 04/15/2020
Dimensions: 6.00" L, 8.90" W, 0.50" H

Borderland Apocrypha

Paperback

Price: $17.95

Overview

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican–American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America.

Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody’s collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past.

Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn’s 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.

Read More
Reviews
"This book creates a new mechanism of critique through its forensic and conspiratorial speaker who gathers the dearth of evidence left behind by imperialism's worse offenders and parses out a thrilling and trenchant document on the U.S. West's legacy anti-Mexican bigotry. 'The inheritance of the elsewhere is a cave of collapse, ' writes Cody in a collection that will change the way we think about recovering histories."–Carmen Giménez-Smith
More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 1632430762
ISBN-13: 9781632430762
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publish Date: 04/15/2020
Dimensions: 6.00" L, 8.90" W, 0.50" H
Skip to content