It's an honor to introduce you, Anthony.
Even though we just met a couple of hours ago,
I know from reading your work that our work is
in conversation.
So I look forward to future conversations with you,
and hearing about your new projects are really awesome.
In the opening section of Anthony Cody's book,
Borderland Apocrypha, what we think
are the boundaries and markings of a poem
are opened and seemingly freed, only to enter into new borders
through novel ways of organization and restraint.
And it looks like we're going to get the visual element as well,
which is really, really key.
But the length of the book-- it's in this landscape mode,
you can see on the table, it's this long, long book--
is a vital part also of experiencing the poems,
for among other reasons.
The long titles are able to remain unbroken,
while Cody is able to map a past, present, and future
for our bordered lives.
These are poems that are organized
in a way that attempt to escape the usual boundaries,
and where language repeats in copy, pasta, glory,
meme glory, the original definition of meme.
These poems look like a lost desert language,
where some language is able to cross
while other words stay behind.
And yet, some words do get to cross.
Borderland Apocrypha uses the language of the border
and uses the historical users of the language of the border
to smuggle stories of this savage, captured property,
the primitive, jailed property and the property
of the crossers.
Blink, and you'll miss the Pedialyte, the cans of tuna
that are carried through the borderlands.
A violent language intersects with violent historical acts
that intersect then with art.
A three-pronged read that makes the mind long.
A Tripadvisor review of border violence.
Verb the noun, and monument me, my site.
Cody's book is an edited version of those who dare to cross.
Cody's book is a document and works within docupoetics.
It's an intersection of how we exist
in data, how data represents us, but can never capture us,
except when it does capture and keep us tight in its snare.
The poems remind me that what we study when we study history,
and then we become it in the unavoidable fits and starts
of one culture assimilating into the other,
creating new cultures with an eye to the past.
Borderland Apocrypha is a language
ripping through a border.
As scythes gallop across the border,
this book gallops in my imagination.
Enter the portal of border history at your own risk.
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody creates its own border,
and then attempts to cross it.
Its own checkpoint and the price of admission is your attention.
There is a nimble beauty in the repetition and starkness
of language in Anthony Cody's poetry that reflects a reality,
but might actually show us a mirror into our ultra
real, too real current lives, too
real and ultra real meaning, our avatars, our loved ones'
avatars, our imagined frenemies' avatars that we navigate
through screens.
And then, we have to navigate the real ones.
Borderland Apocrypha is a real one.
Anthony Cody is from Fresno, California
with lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl.
His debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha,
won the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a 2021 American Book
Award, and a 2020 Southwest Book Award,
as well as recognized as a finalist for the National Book
Award, PEN America Jean Stein Award, the LA Times Book
Award, among others.
He serves as an editor for Omnidawn and Noemi Press.
Please help me welcome Anthony Cody.
[APPLAUSE]