Roberto Tejada is the author of the poetry collections Why the Assembly Disbanded, Full Foreground, Exposition Park, and Mirrors for Gold, as well as several works of art and media history. A translator, editor, essayist, art historian, and cultural critic, Tejada’s research and creative interests involve the language arts and image worlds of Latin America, especially Mexico, Brazil, the US-Mexico Borderlands, and other sites of US Latinx cultural production. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches in the Departments of English, Creative Writing, and Art History. Carbonate of Copper is his new collection of poetry.
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Roberto Tejada
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Carbonate of Copper
Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement in "Carbonate of Copper." The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line.
The book's title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed.
Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.
