Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. 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 section titles of Tejada’s intense, harrowing new book are derived from place names, as though the poems marked some sort of periplus, an account of a journey. And indeed, Tejada initiates a journey that begins in the familial and radiates into a world of 'missing through-lines,' surveilled borders, of sequestrations and dispossessions. Perhaps more significantly, it is the kaleidoscopic originality of Tejada’s language, its at once precise and vividly sensual chthonic glow, that lights the way for the reader’s own journey by insistently 'propelling forward a hope.'"

—Forrest Gander, author of Mojave Ghost