Sometimes a book of poems eerily foresees the mood of the times. As I write, federal agents storm apartment complexes in Chicago by helicopter, breaking through doors and zip-tying residents. They spread tear gas near public schools. They detain citizen and noncitizen alike, acting first on forms of racial discrimination. On October 4, a Customs and Border Protection agent shot Marimar Martinez, who CBP officials alleged was armed and tried to run down federal officers with her car. The government’s charges against Martinez and Anthony Ruiz were later dropped, although Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin emphasized previous claims, calling them “domestic terrorists.” Such tactics by the federal government have increased nationally, and are most intensely felt closest to the US-Mexico border. Just a few days after Martinez was shot, Texas Bishop Mark Seitz met with Pope Leo XIV to share a packet of letters from immigrant families in the El Paso area who fear they, too, will be incarcerated as Border Patrol tactics become increasingly forceful and widespread.
Although poetry is rarely evoked in a context of national crisis, Roberto Tejada’s Carbonate of Copper intervenes with urgency in our present situation by examining psychic and personal histories attached to borders, race, migration, citizenship, and self. His work articulates a dense and ongoing confrontation between the desire for agency and a political and discursive terrain shaped by racial hierarchy and exploitation. Yet he frequently addresses this confrontation through surprising poetic strategies that excavate histories of contemporary conflict in the physical world, locating geopolitics in geological environments and material histories of place. In the book’s postscript, Tejada explains that the title refers to “a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had a discernible impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and systems of extraction” (146). He goes on to describe carbonate of copper as a “guiding figure” through which to “animate material realities [and] to trace entanglements in the web of life,” thereby “welcom[ing] language as substance subject to change.” The title poem follows the mineral into a complex, shifting mediation of selfhood and vicinity:
days now deficient in matters of fact
so many attachments of the tribe
to this stupefying circle it burns
a new image of the earth disabling
the view from nowhere
am I unsheltered
and so out of time as to wonder
does my face defy its aim on end am I
the architect of this very small
thing I derive or refuse from the seven
descendants (43)
Located on the Texas border with Mexico, the speaker moves physically and psychically through dimensions of global and personal apprehension, inhabiting material and human realities that are “unsheltered” and “out of time.” The self, “this very small thing,” engages a landscape of migrant passage and border confinement, where contested legal orders produce suffering and conflict. The imposed geopolitics of a border demarcates “a landscape here” of “abundant sun summer green // river valley chestnut little balm / border milestone” (44).
The book shifts between multiple scales of representation and sensation, moving at micro- and macrolevels in which the self is both intimate, particularized as “this very small thing,” and also distributed within larger national and even cosmic relations, enlarged with lyric amplitudes of connectivity. Tejada’s political urgency builds on these incongruent layers of focused perception and vast receivership to query relations of self and national boundaries, scrutinizing where resource extraction and brute nationalism converge, past and present entwine:
came the builders
of a sudden identical twins at the sugar
mill it has a window overlooking
the carbonate of copper on shapes
predictive in the wireless ether (44)
The “sugar // mill” recalls colonial extraction of material goods and the systemic violence imposed on subjugated and enslaved subjects in the so-called New World. The historic scale of the colonial past and the present surveillance of the US/Mexico border are enmeshed within more confined visual frames, such as “the strata of mineral life” observed in the postscript. Tejada traces a simultaneous expansion and narrowing of visual focus, “so transforming perceiver and vicinity, as by a spell in which a person aches to inhabit a magnitude beyond the individual” (145). In the passage above, the “wireless ether” resonates with the promise of communicative links, but also contributes to the invisible presence of the secured border state. Technological violence and surveillance thus disorient and deterritorialize physical space, refracting the colonial resonance of the sugar mill into contemporary lived conditions. Immersed in lives encountered through border space, the poem attunes itself to the striated terms of the landscape and its historic transactions, filtered through the poet’s senses—mediating a history that remains unresolved and vitally present.
Here and in various other moments, Carbonate of Copper audibly charges a visual field that merges in scale and in dislocations of language, earth forms, and people. Tejada’s writing draws substance from auditory and visual stimuli entangled with psychic projection and desire; through bodily senses of sound and sight, the poems articulate a macrocosm of mineral, plant, animal, and human life caught in webs, the “wireless ether” of systems of control. Poetry becomes a medium through which sonic and visual fields find realization in language. Tejada does not separate his lyric “I” from local and historical environments but instead exposes the “I” to these surroundings, while refusing commentary in favor of revelation.
In his notes on an unfinished study of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin observed history in terms of a kaleidoscopic catastrophe. “The course of history,” he wrote,
can actually claim no more attention than a child’s kaleidoscope, which with every turn of the hand dissolves the established order into a new array…. The concepts of the ruling class have always been the mirrors that enabled an image of “order” to prevail.—The kaleidoscope must be smashed.[1]
Tejada similarly confronts colonialism’s staged image of “order,” encountering both his complicity in and resistance to it. While he is concerned with generations-old conflict, with colonial forms of physical and psychic violence, and with lives that merge in landscapes of contemporary North America, his work foregrounds an attunement to language and its exertions of contrapuntal force, music, and intelligence. In “Oxygen,” for instance, subjectivity resonates through temporal dislocation: “Here like a yellow iris I riffle flame,” he begins, “on frozen rock over broken ground / into icier emancipations” (50). This isolated figure—of ancient advent or contemporary exile—tends a flame at the threshold of transmutation, confronting the animistic rudiments of language and life, as human becomes bird: “I elongate in wingspan / where in daybreak defiance / of breath again I rehearse / according to promise” (51). The “material contradiction of our kin,” he writes in the hallucinatory sensory record “Night Festival,” places insight “among the living long after the land / overcame my conformity” (8). Drawn from memory and dream imagery, this poem engages Tejada’s familial past—migrants from Colombia—and the shaping of identity within the kaleidoscope of North American hegemony.
Approaching the night festival, the poet fears trespassing: “I have no business on the premises,” he writes, “or I fail to comprehend the intimation of despair” (7). With dreamlike urgency, his father appears with “all the microtones of Bogotá,” an acknowledgment of the sonic and bilingual variation revealed through his voice. In a masque of ghostly delirium, grief and recrimination intertwine with adolescent memory and imagination:
my father says apúntalas the words ignominy and escrow
too late or unspecified on the subject
of wake time surrender phosphorescent
in the dimming light of extrasensory
encircled—body before, body after—
I had for my heart a perfect measure
to justify the untimely return
of my neither known never noiseless
and I had for my heart in the age of consent
a little loathing I had a coin that fit
the slot I had my compound fracture
declension of pain and deflated lung
irregularities of color But I know
now the mistake of my ancestry
in the style of my birthday venipuncture
and poultice for my chest infection in the slide
transparencies of my naked limbs and chicken pox
that foretold the phlebotomy of all Erie County
I had now in my ventricles the great nebula of forgetting
and the abrogated law no longer larger than life (8–9)
Hallucinatory sounds actualize feeling in images that reach toward meaning’s limits. In the book’s concluding notes, Tejada remarks that this poem emerged after a series of “dreamtime visitations” from his deceased parents following his first dose of the COVID vaccine in winter 2021 (147). The text’s geography of displacement—from Bogotá to Los Angeles to Buffalo—becomes what feminist philosopher Joan Copjec describes as a proximity that complicates the boundaries of ego: “more than one with itself because capable of being other than itself.”[2] Tejada invites readers to witness subjectivity in extensions of palpable sensation through micro- and macrorelations (see “the slide / transparencies of my naked limbs” above). He argues with the dead and sides with the undead “in accounts of the knowable, the limits of a self in sound, the horizons of doubt in the keys of consternation and amazement” (147).
To be human, in Tejada’s account, is to remain vulnerable to chaotic interior and exterior pressures—and this ontological outlook shapes his approach to political crisis and brutality. In “Tunnel,” the speaker becomes “parent now to a generation / in the grid system ushering my daughter / across to absorb the aloneness / and rage of human inhabitants who / abandoned the shelter as commanded / by the holy book foretold in the floodlights / from our drone delivery for survival” (102). These lines unmistakably evoke the violent surveillance of the border, where the techno-theocratic state imposes order through drone and floodlight. Yet the poem does not rehearse conventional idioms of resistance. Instead, it acknowledges a “rage of human inhabitants” without shelter:
The tunnel served once as human shelter but no longer
there was barely enough room now to wonder
in the early hours of the dark whether
the threshold was equipped for us to safely
execute the next pivotal phase or avail a person’s
fate in the fury of aerosol droplets (103)
A sense of dispossession and migrancy is conveyed in chimeric imagery, where the boundaries between perception and physical landscape blur. Another piece, “Birthright,” describes “the rodent like conspiracy” to bestow sovereignty, this “depressive / position,” even as citizens of any nation are confined by “speech a species of murmur.” Legal definitions of citizenship cannot contain the linguistic and affective excess of subjectivity: “its refutation of my birthright and habitat / its capacity to disturb and expropriate…my heredity” (138). The accident of birth and the historical consequences of racial hierarchies fracture these poems’ subjects. In “Song,” Tejada scrutinizes the arbitrariness and cruelty of “genetic chance”: “even as I hazard upward / to apprehend what was / never of my other life / or ever once and for all” (140). Here, birthright becomes less a legal determination than a narrative exposure, shaped by the material, familial, and geopolitical conditions that inform a life. Language in Carbonate of Copper participates in the simultaneous making and unmaking of subjectivity, cohering not into unity but into a porous, resonant field of intersecting forces: legal, ancestral, personal, and environmental.
In addition to poems, the book includes a series of archival black-and-white photographs titled “Sign for Bridge.” Taken by Farm Security Administration photographers Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Russell Lee (1903–1986), and Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) in the 1930s and ’40s, these images depict everyday life in settlements along the Texas-Mexico border: Brownsville, Neches, Mercedes, and San Juan. In a subtitle, Tejada introduces the photographs as a “Fable,” invoking the Latin fabula (story, moral tale, common talk). The images of migrant laborers, bean harvesters, hamburger stands, and carnival rides expose the incongruities between lived experience and national narrative: parade crowds stand before a marquee for Lone Star Vigilantes (1942); a truck displays an extended thumb with the words “No Sir” painted on the windshield to indicate no hitchhiking; a bridge sign directs traffic to the border. These images participate in the textual and visual boundaries imposed by Anglo-settler power in the Rio Grande Valley, and give pause for reflection on a historical demarcation where distinct racialized nationalities converge in episodes of visual contrasts. By including this photo gallery, Tejada renders the past’s persistence in the imagination of the present, providing a backdrop of narratives where forms of migrant labor are sharply delineated by civic diversions. Readers find not agitprop but lyric expressivity opening a sense of wonder. The relationship of the past to Tejada’s encounter with the contemporary border is similarly lyric, personal, but magnified by the current atmosphere of unlawful incarceration and deportation. Like the poems throughout the rest of the book, albeit by different means, the photographic section shows lives full of contrasts (migrant workers, their tools of livelihood, their forms of transportation, their homes), cofixed inside structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy.
Unlike Tejada’s earlier works—Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), and Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010)—with their dense lyricism, syntactic fragmentation, and collage-like architectures, Carbonate of Copper unfolds with a more fluid, searching lyricism. Its organizing force is a subjectivity defined by uncertainty, mirrored and mediated through textures of language itself. Yet these hesitations—linguistic, ethical, ontological—offer promise: “a residue of sound,” a “body obliged to disentangle / today from the persistent // microplastic order” (128, 131). The poet’s task is to absorb and release, to reinhabit anew the contrasts of encounter, and so to bear witness to kaleidoscopic political realities made palpable through linguistic soundscapes and embodied life.
Notes:
[1] Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Balknap Press, 2003), 164.
[2] Joan Copjec, “Sexual Difference,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Fordham Univertsity Press, 2018), 202. Qtd. in Tejada, Carbonate of Copper, 147.