Carbonate of Copper

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 Munoz (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.

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

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