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.

“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