By Natalie Scenters-Zapico

From undocumented males named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s gripping debut assortment, The Verging Cities, is full of explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels within the household sphere. Deeply rooted alongside the US-México border within the sister towns of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, those poems supply a courageous new voice to the ways that overseas politics impact the person. Composed in quite a few types, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and box notes, every one poem distills violent tales of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol brokers, and the folks who fall in love with one another and their traumas.

The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral position the place the true is (sur)real. In those poems mouths converse suspended from ceilings, numbered steel poles mark the border and fans’ spines, and towns scream to one another at evening via fences that “ooze purely silt.” This daring new imaginative and prescient of border existence among what has been named the most secure urban within the usa and the homicide capital of the realm is in deep dialog with different border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while constructing itself as a brand new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the start of 1 factor and the tip of one other in consistent cycle.

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They swim down his face to turn the soil. His tongue lies in blood that’s collected between his teeth. He swallows red until he cries it. Streams run around his nostrils; they bloom into a field of roses at his chin. Birds perch on his gums and drink the salt of him. His body, three feet away in a cooler, rots with two beers and a knife. His wide eyes are bruised and have turned black. A girl comes to climb the tree for fruit and shakes at each branch. The birds, scared, fly into the tree. She opens the cooler, she covers her face, she vomits.

I told mouth: Learn English. Mouth, like a child, pursed its lips and spat. I asked: Mouth, where is your body? I asked: Mouth, where could your delicate hands be? Mouth floated above me, an uneven hole. It would never leave me, this mouth. My id mouth, this mouth—my mother’s. 34 angel reassures me i have escaped the verging cities And when I realize that the woman in the film looks just like my sister and the film will end as all snuff films end, I wonder if I should turn off my computer. And the lens, too burnt to tell if the man that pulls her hair has a cigarette or a toothpick in his mouth, only reveals I can’t stand to see her planked body.

His body, three feet away in a cooler, rots with two beers and a knife. His wide eyes are bruised and have turned black. A girl comes to climb the tree for fruit and shakes at each branch. The birds, scared, fly into the tree. She opens the cooler, she covers her face, she vomits. She looks at his head and says, Un hombre. 31 the archeologist came to hunt trilobites hidden in the rocks. He looked for the curve of their antennae. He hunted trilobites and ferns caked in white. He hunted trilobites and ferns until he found a human skull.

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