Indifferent Cities - by Ángel García (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poems exploring the push and pull of migration and immigration, familial archive, and regional history.

Through one state to another, from one country to the next Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations.

Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, Indifferent Cities wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author's inevitable return to determine where and to who he belongs.

Review Quotes

"Indifferent Cities scours time and space to recover and repair what borders, empire, violences, and intergenerational traumas attempt to erase and swallow: truth and origin. With skillful command across traditional and invented forms, as well as a multitude of valences, Ángel García gathers letters, archives, correspondence, oral histories, and his own lived experience to constellate a lineage that simultaneously askews fracture and redefines wholeness. From heartbreak to healvision, this collection gifts a framework to journey into the depths of ancestry to both probe and celebrate what is revealed. García knows, 'where I must go no directions exist.' These are poems chanting deep into a thousand ancestral moons, inhaling what has been forgotten and exhaling what will be a new collective future. Indifferent Cities reminds us, 'If there is no beginning, here is no end.' And in this way, this book asks each person to begin again, with every thread of history weaving us into the sunrise."-- "Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha"

"Indifferent Cities traces a relentless search--for names, for language itself. Ángel García's lyrics reveal a myriad of forms, shadow, story, reflection, reverberation, negation, missive, reversal. If reading is a migration of thought across a page, these poems confound and renew our sense of direction. Podemos decir poema-como-brújula, brújula-como-elegía, elegía-como-composición-de-ausencias, which for García, consist of the endless shapes of a family's love translated across time and terrain, lenguaje y linaje, silence and song."-- "Patrick Rosal, author of The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems"

"Ángel García's Indifferent Cities has the feel of an epic journey: a quest for a return, to find a family, to find a name, a history, an identity. Along the way, the poet's multilingual documentations of the diasporic Americas suggest that movement is both a politics and a poetics: where not knowing is an epistemological position that is central to the experience of trying to understand how the forces of history have shaped who you are and what your body and words might become."-- "Daniel Borzutzky, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry"

"Sometimes ferocious, and always ferociously honest, Ángel García's poems address themselves to the cycle of violence that arises at the many borders, both enforced and inhabited, in the US-Latino experience: between macho stereotypes and sensuous masculinity, between painful alienation and penitent acceptance, and ultimately, between loss and love. Yet for all the bruised fists, black eyes, and broken jaws here, there are no victims in these harrowing poems, as they search not for blame, but for bravery--the courage to see oneself in the mirror, and recognize our universal humanity always hungrily staring back."-- "Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only"

About the Author

Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, recipient of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and finalist for a PEN America Open Book Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.