Carbonate of Copper

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 GhostTejada’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

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.