Borderland Apocrypha. This item is unavailable.Borderland Apocrypha

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican―American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America.

Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody’s collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past.

Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn's 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, which won the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a 2022 Whiting Award, 2021 American Book Award, 2020 Southwest Book Award, 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN America / Jean Stein Award, and the L.A. Times Book Award, among others. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Magma, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, NinthLetter, Prairie Schooner, ctrl+v journal, and TriQuarterly, among others. He coedited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology, and he coedited and cotranslated Juan Felipe Herrera's Akrílica. He serves as poetry editor for Noemi Press and Omnidawn, and he lives with his partner, poet Mai Der Vang, in Fresno, California.