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A midway of poetic styles and syllabic tableaux
Imagine a walking tour of stanzas and prose poems that give lyric voice to sight, public speech, and spectacle. In Exhibition Park, Roberto Tejada delivers a command performance in mixed genres that compel an array of literary styles. His poetry undertakes a wide range of subjects motivated by artworks from Latin America and the United States covering the colonial period to the present day.
In serial poems, short sketches, guidebook parodies, painterly triptychs, translations, and other word-based dioramas, Tejada coins wonder with historical styles—baroque, classic, and experimental. As likened to a world’s fair, the resulting voices intone global stories, the dream life of art, and first-person atmospheres both premodern and postindustrial.
“Tejada’s work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications... The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose…”—Alan Gilbert in Another Future: Poetry and Modern Art in a Postmodern Twilight
“You walk through his world as a voyeur, a traveler of mirrors, witnessing your own reflection in the masses of flesh, simultaneously aroused and disturbed at the same time. Tejada’s work is an invitation, a window into another world, unabashedly erotic, and succinct.”—Christine Lark Fox, Poetry Project Newsletter, about Mirrors for Gold
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
From the Book:
If we recognize the variety and groundlessness
of grounds, if we speak from perplexity as
opposed to portrayal, if we are locked into the one
approach dominant in our time when
problems appeared at the periphery, “our distinctions
so that they cut between the bones,” can we
promise the standpoint of employing critique
or such assumption as to give voice and image
in light of solace or satisfaction?
– From “Golden Age”
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ROBERTO TEJADA is a visual arts critic, photography historian, and curator. He is currently associate professor of art history at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of a book of poetry, Mirrors for Gold (Kruspkaya, 2006), and two chapbooks, Amulet Anatomy (Phylum, 2001) and Gift + Verdict (Leroy Press, 1999). His book, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment, studies art historical episodes in relation to visual documents and local identities in Mexican and U.S. culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); he continues to co-edit the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas.
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A Driftless Series Book
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This book is the 2010 selection in the Driftless National category,
for a second poetry book by a United States citizen.
The Driftless Series is funded by the
Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
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This project is supported in part by an award from the
 National Endowment for the Arts
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