Full Foreground (Camino del Sol) - Softcover

Tejada, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816521336 ISBN 13: 9780816521333

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2012

Synopsis

Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US–Mexico relations, Latino identity, and the political emotion of queer sexualities. His collection provides a holistic ground-level view of pivotal world events from the mid 1990s to a more recent present.

Tejada’s innovative work dramatically widens the scope of Latina/o literature, showing us exactly what it can accomplish. The poems move very much like a three-act play, in which the first act is one of origins; the second, a staging of desire; and the third, a symbiosis. These acts magnify one another when unified. Each poem within the collection positions itself within the avant-garde, in which the artful use of language aims to dazzle, surprise, and enliven. The poems dance by, preserving a tension between hurry and delay, momentum and stasis, and every line is like a newly launched firecracker, sending out startling patterns of spark and flare.

Tejada’s exuberant language stretches the limits of selfhood and the way it is represented in poetry. He illuminates the tangled webs that are woven when identities are linked to sexuality, nationality, privilege, and temporality. The concerns and obsessions voiced here turn the construction of desire on its head, forcing us to ask ourselves what is worthy of our attentions.

About this title

About the Author

Roberto Tejada is Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University. He is also the founder and co-editor of the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas and the author of Exposition Park.

Reviews

Tejada’s day job as Distinguished Endowed Chair of Art History at a university near the U.S.-Mexico border informs the displaced poetics of his third collection, following Exposition Park (2010). Tejada juxtaposes stark facts about murder rates in Tijuana with phrasing taken from the New York Times on the day after 9/11 and appropriates passages from the noncanonical Book of Enoch to illustrate an incident in Memphis involving police officers and a hog-tied student. Such spatial and temporal dislocation allows Tejada’s speakers to inhabit an arena that’s simultaneously public and private and give voice to rhetoric and political critique as sound bites and headlines dissolve into kernels of verbal information tethered together by bracing humor and the educated historian’s perspective and terminology. In endnotes, Tejada describes how he worked with visual artists to organize language from this collection for an exhibition, a sort of inverted ekphrasis, in which, instead of poems describing pictures, pictures “describe” poems. Tejada’s dialog between linguistic play and stark insight both deconstructs and embodies the incessant media static of early twenty-first-century existence. --Diego Báez

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816521336
• ISBN 13: 9780816521333
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80