WEBVTT

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Hello, everyone.

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Hi.

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Hey.

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[LAUGHING] Everyone's like, oh.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I know it's a little cold.

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It's a bummer.

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We're so spoiled here.

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Just want to thank you once
again for supporting us here

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at the Poetry Center, and
just thankful for the best way

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that I see you all supporting.

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It's just by showing
up to the readings,

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by watching our readings
on YouTube, by subscribing

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to our channel, by
coming and visiting

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our classes and workshops.

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So thank you so
much for doing that.

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Happy Spring 2023.

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Whew.

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We made it.

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[APPLAUSE]

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We made it.

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I'm Diana Delgado, and I'm
the literary director here

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at the Poetry Center.

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And I curate the reading
and lecture series and also

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the classes and workshops,
and a whole bunch

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of other things with the team
here at the Poetry Center.

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Tonight is a very special
night because we are here

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to celebrate one of my favorite
poets ever, Roberto Tejada.

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Let's give a hand for Roberto.

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[APPLAUSE]

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He's a poet that
I have followed,

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not only for his words,
but for his words

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about words, and for his words
that are at last resolved.

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Please know that at
the end of the reading,

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we will be selling books.

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And we will also be just talking
a little bit about the upcoming

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spring season.

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Unfortunately, I
do want to share

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that Susan Briante,
who was ready,

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and who was a great
friend and a great poet,

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was going to be introducing
Roberto, could not make it.

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So what I thought
I would do is just

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share a little bit of the
back cover of Why the Assembly

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Disbanded, which is Roberto's
newest book, because I think

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they did an excellent job in
describing his work in a way

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that I potentially would never
be able to do in 10 minutes.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"Immersive, postmodern,
and philosophical.

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Why the Assembly Disbanded
provides us an associative,

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critical, Latinx aesthetic
connecting the Mexico- United

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States borderlands to Latin
America's neo-baroque heritage.

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Migrants, settlers,
tourists, and exiles

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moving across various
hemispheric landscapes

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are featured in these
exuberant, capacious,

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and self-reflexive poems.

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Tejada relates the
ravages of white supremacy

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in our culture that, together
with immigrant precarity,

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turn home into a place of
foreboding and impending

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eviction, even as
a dream- weather

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makes room at last for scenes
of possibility and attainment

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in the account of human history.

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The sweeping futuristic
vistas open onto narratives

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of colonial extraction,
human displacement,

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abuses of capitalism,
mass media spectacle,

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the antagonism of language
and technical images

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in the sensorium of urban
and digital life, worlds,

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and the relations
of desire encouraged

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by pictures and words in
the economy of attention.

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With language
given to pageantry,

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tonal precision, and a
hopeful lyric radiance

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that can accommodate
ecstasy and justice,

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Roberto Tejada's carnivalesque
borderland imagery

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pushes the boundaries
of Latinx literature.

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World building by way
of reverie, speculation,

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and retro-futurist tableaux, and
with vivid, sometimes violent,

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particularity, his poems
enact hallucinatory realities

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of the hemisphere
and imagination that

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triangulate history, lyricism,
and art a social practice."

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Please help me welcome
Roberto Tejada.

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[APPLAUSE]

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