Thank you, Sylvia.
Because he is back home, I will be referring to our next
reader, Francisco Cantú, as Paco.
I first met Paco here at the Poetry Center
where he taught the class, "Nonfiction as Reconstruction."
From the very beginning, he struck me
as someone who really listened, who
is thoughtful in his response.
He's a noticer.
Paco served in the US Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012.
He entered the program with a singular purpose--
to tell this story of the border, a necessary one,
and because of its necessity, a hard story to tell.
Fenton Johnson, a writer and creative writing professor
here says of Paco, "I see lots of good writing
but Paco has something to say.
His writing is superb, yes, but as much as
that, it is necessary--
the highest compliment I can offer."
"The Line Becomes A River" provides no easy answers.
Paco's work shows that even as institutions diminish
the humanity of those they police,
something must remain to connect with another human,
to show up, to render aid, to care.
It is about people who do the violence mandated
by institutions, about the gradual dissolution of morals
that allows one to commit acts of violence.
It is about war, about moral injury,
about institutional violence, all of which
sit at the heart of American life and imagination
whether one wants to admit it or not.
It's uncomfortable because bureaucracy is a meat grinder,
and no one really wants to see how the sausage gets made.
It's ugly.
And Paco doesn't shy away from those brutal truths.
Brutality injures the enforcers as well as
those being enforced.
No one emerges unscathed.
One of Paco's mentors, Alison Deming said it very well.
I celebrate the emergence of his voice
as a work for our desert landscape
and the people who are perhaps most intimate with it
in our time.
Those crossing and those policing the crossings.
His work is lyric, documentary, and soulful
in a field where there is enough human trauma
to go around for all.
And empathy is the first principle
in understanding where we are, and where we need to go.
The reach of this book during this time cannot be understated
in its importance.
In her debut Amazon.com review, my mother, Debbie Galloway,
wrote, "Heartbreaking.
Gave me a lot to think about.
I loved this book."
She convinced her small, West Texas library
to order copies of the book saying to me,
"Maybe the people around here will think twice
before building that damn wall."
So much of "The Line Becomes a River"
is about families and communities,
an undocumented man's struggle to keep his family together,
the narrator's relationship with his mother
as his moral center, the complicated camaraderie
of those who serve.
There's a quote by WG Sebald that I
think Paco would appreciate, and it
goes, "The more images I gathered from the past,
the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually
happened in this way, or that way.
For nothing about it could be called normal.
Most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling."
This after all is our relationship with history,
and what we are called upon to confront.
Paco bravely takes on this challenge in his book--
to look the absurd, and the appalling in the face
and see a way to an ethics of care.
With that, please join me in welcoming Paco.
[APPLAUSE]