Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest and the 2021 American Book Award. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, the PEN America/Jean Stein Book Award, and was longlisted for The Believer Editor’s Award. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, he has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and a poetry editor for Omnidawn.
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Borderland ApocryphaPoemsFrom"Act III – Scene 2: After the Drowned who Leapt from the Mercurio, Operation Wetback, 1954"
To remain :: is to grieve
:: is to answer
:: what side of the río
we crown
:: or
:: where your ancestors
Coffin
Borderland Apocrypha:Poems- Print Books
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Borderland ApocryphaPoemsFrom"No te quedes"
No. Do not stay here. Along this on-ramp.
This hill. This earbone of blood, a puddled
cochlea. No. A tectonic. No. An erupting contraption
rugiendo until the manufactured labyrinth of trenzas
and nerves buckle and bridge. Somehow
las raíces florecen, the quiet exhale of soil
resting from rain: la tierra nunca abandons, remains
out of breath from farewells. Despedidas and patience
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Borderland ApocryphaPoemsFrom"A passport photo asks me to 2 x 2 myself and capture what I am in neutral and I recall I have yet to see the chamber of my hear turn tusk"
turn dusk
turn day
turn lengua
turn lingua
turn franca
turn español
turn sombra
así
atrás
allí
acá
to here
yes
here
yes
here it is dark
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“Cody presents what has not been revealed, what must be said. This one-of-a-kind-book settles all cases against all border-crossers. It is possible: a brave, bold syntax, an unseen intelligence of ourselves, a new America. Bravo for these compassionate and brutal time-spaces, this brisling land voice— an exemplar of a bursting literature. Everything starts over now.” —Juan Felipe Herrera [on Borderland Apocrypha]
"This book creates a new mechanism of critique through its forensic and conspiratorial speaker who gathers the dearth of evidence left behind by imperialism’s worse offenders and parses out a thrilling and trenchant document on the U.S. West’s legacy anti-Mexican bigotry. [Borderland Apocrypha is] a collection that will change the way we think about recovering histories." —Carmen Giménez-Smith
“Part elegy, part warning, Borderland Apocrypha trains our attention upon those who have been continuously cast out through violence and legislation, those who are still running, those who are not at rest.” —Emily Pérez, RHINO Poetry
Selected Works
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How does poetry grow, change, answer the present moment? In the work of Anthony Cody, it stretches the form to become what it describes. These are poems about borders and the refusal of borders in which the words themselves are held captive, held back, or pushed to the margins. With boldness and formal dexterity, Cody assembles his spectral poems from official records, guidebooks, works of history, maps, laws and edicts, and the traces of bitter and bloody memory. In this invigorating work, Cody has enlarged what’s possible for American poetry.