precis
The border is a policed realm, neoliberal market, an affective landscape of spectral echoes, a geography of traces. These are the principles that assemble precis around certain coordinates. The death of a girl, a crossing narrative, media static of late-century rhetoric on border bodies, precis involves poetry in mapping the Mexico/US border and its relationship to America, while resisting the urge to impose a definitiveness. precis, in its sustained breath, simply asks: What about the body? What about the personal and the communal? In precis the reader is asked to follow along without forgetting that overshadowed in every moment of the known, every authorization of what is, there is a print or silence asking what should there also be.
excerpted in BAX: Best American Experimental Writing & in Apogee
a finalist for the
Bob Kaufman Poetry Prize
1913 Press Book Prize
Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize
teach this book
This book is essential for any Border Studies, and/or Latinx Literature and Culture course. With its focus on bodies, affect, and power, precis also offers working terms for students in any Theory, Affect Studies, or Biopolitics course, as well as general Humanities courses and Political Theory courses examining National identity through interdisciplinary lenses.