Hello, everyone.
Hi.
Hey.
[LAUGHING] Everyone's like, oh.
[LAUGHTER]
I know it's a little cold.
It's a bummer.
We're so spoiled here.
Just want to thank you once again for supporting us here
at the Poetry Center, and just thankful for the best way
that I see you all supporting.
It's just by showing up to the readings,
by watching our readings on YouTube, by subscribing
to our channel, by coming and visiting
our classes and workshops.
So thank you so much for doing that.
Happy Spring 2023.
Whew.
We made it.
[APPLAUSE]
We made it.
I'm Diana Delgado, and I'm the literary director here
at the Poetry Center.
And I curate the reading and lecture series and also
the classes and workshops, and a whole bunch
of other things with the team here at the Poetry Center.
Tonight is a very special night because we are here
to celebrate one of my favorite poets ever, Roberto Tejada.
Let's give a hand for Roberto.
[APPLAUSE]
He's a poet that I have followed,
not only for his words, but for his words
about words, and for his words that are at last resolved.
Please know that at the end of the reading,
we will be selling books.
And we will also be just talking a little bit about the upcoming
spring season.
Unfortunately, I do want to share
that Susan Briante, who was ready,
and who was a great friend and a great poet,
was going to be introducing Roberto, could not make it.
So what I thought I would do is just
share a little bit of the back cover of Why the Assembly
Disbanded, which is Roberto's newest book, because I think
they did an excellent job in describing his work in a way
that I potentially would never be able to do in 10 minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
"Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical.
Why the Assembly Disbanded provides us an associative,
critical, Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico- United
States borderlands to Latin America's neo-baroque heritage.
Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles
moving across various hemispheric landscapes
are featured in these exuberant, capacious,
and self-reflexive poems.
Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy
in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity,
turn home into a place of foreboding and impending
eviction, even as a dream- weather
makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment
in the account of human history.
The sweeping futuristic vistas open onto narratives
of colonial extraction, human displacement,
abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle,
the antagonism of language and technical images
in the sensorium of urban and digital life, worlds,
and the relations of desire encouraged
by pictures and words in the economy of attention.
With language given to pageantry,
tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance
that can accommodate ecstasy and justice,
Roberto Tejada's carnivalesque borderland imagery
pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature.
World building by way of reverie, speculation,
and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent,
particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities
of the hemisphere and imagination that
triangulate history, lyricism, and art a social practice."
Please help me welcome Roberto Tejada.
[APPLAUSE]