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    The Verging Cities
    The Verging Cities
    The Verging Cities
    Ebook74 pages45 minutes

    The Verging Cities

    By Natalie Scenters-Zapico

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s gripping debut collection, The Verging Cities, is filled with explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels in the domestic sphere. Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas.

    The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Press of Colorado
    Release dateApr 15, 2015
    ISBN9781885635440
    The Verging Cities

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Raw and powerful. I love surrealism, so that was an interesting and fun aspect of this collection—if anything depicting the darkness of the immigrant experience can be fun. Many of the images and all of the emotion in these poems will stick with me for a long time. They are gritty and real and help me understand. I wish the pain in these pages didn’t exist, but I’m so grateful for Natalie Scenters-Zapico revealing it in all its terrors. It has made me more aware of what our sisters and brothers are experiencing at the borders and beyond.
    • 5/5
      This is a collection of the violence that's overt and implicit. There are many things left unsaid, allowing the reader to create their own conclusions as to what the writing is about, much different to Lima :: Limón. Here, the reader must read between the lines: is the lack of overt violence in this piece mean there isn't an act of violence happening? No piece makes it more obvious than "A JOURNALIST’S FIELD NOTES ON THE KENTUCKY CLUB" which details a supposed journalist's foray into a Juarez club, and in every line they're expecting something bad to happen to themselves, overhearing atrocities happening to marginalized communities; but since the violence isn't directed towards them, the journalist is disappointed. Scenters-Zapico says with her poetry, "how much of our trauma must we bleed for it to suffice and be seen as valid?" The writer blends in fictional and real, confuses the reader enough for us to think if what she writes about happened or not. In turn, she replies, does it matter; if you believe it's real then it's probably happening to someone, so what are you gonna do about it?
      Most of all, this collection is a story of the US Mexico border, particularly of Juárez. It is protagonist and ghost. It is victim and survivor. It is chain link and as real as every detained person. The Verging City is about the sun beating down on the border, and the dangers that lurk in the night. It is witnessing generational trauma be revisited upon an already traumatized body.
      Anyway, Natalie Scenters-Zapico for a Nobel Prize in Literature when???

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