My Perfect Cognate - by Natalie Scenters-Zapico (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Staggering between English and Spanish, language becomes Scenters-Zapico's mirror, reflecting her body, her family, and the borders that confine them.

My Perfect Cognate interrogates the connections and contrasts at the sharp edges of her in-betweens: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico, where the author and her mother were often stopped, interrogated. Written from the depths of severe post-partum depression, Natalie Scenters-Zapico searches for a language that can hold both personal and communal pain. When Spanish and English seem insufficient, she leans on the connection between the two languages: the cognate. Originally a way to document lineage through the mother, the cognate provides a possible bridge of understanding. Yet, for every cognate that works as a mirror reflection, the wave of a border agent's hand, a stamped passport, a false cognate that works as an expired visa, a rejected biometric scan, a port of entry shut down by violent legislation. Natalie Scenters-Zapico mines the depths of linguistic cognate theory to write poems that go beyond translation and mistranslation. We find hope in a translingual landscape that breaks open borders.

Review Quotes

"Set on the border between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, a zone of lethal risk but vital potential. Other kinds of borders--between languages, immigration statuses, states of consciousness, genders, generations--accumulate around that arbitrary geographic line. . . . The Verging Cities is a frightening book, full of searchlights and shadows, but it's also a book about the private pleasures--of sex, of music, of jokes and meals--that its tenderly drawn young lovers have while in states of anxious in-between-ness and fraught not-quiteness."--New Yorker

"Scenters-Zapico speaks fearlessly throughout this, her second book. In doing so, she illustrates what needs to change so that victims can be freed from the cycle of abuse." --Washington Post, Best Poetry Collections This Month (April 2019)

"Reading the book doesn't make me feel better. It makes me weep with anger and frustration. It opens the wounds people try to ignore. It calls the ambulance." --Indiana Review

"You will not win a staring contest with Natalie Scenters-Zapico; this poet cannot, and will not, look away." --American Microreviews and Interviews

About the Author

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. Her most recent collection is My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon Press Spring/Summer 2025). Winner of Yale University's Windham Campbell Prize, her work has been supported by the Poetry and Lannan Foundations. She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA Creative Writing Programs at the University of South Florida where she is Director of the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library.