Why the Assembly Disbanded

Roberto Tejada

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780823299256
• eBook ISBN: 9780823299263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Literature

Pushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics.

Throughout Roberto Tejada's body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands.

Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico–United States borderlands to Latin America's neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history.

The sweeping futuristic vistas open on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Rubén Ortiz Torres.

With language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada's carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World-building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere: an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice.

1. Society of Alternate Belonging

The work takes place underground …where the possibility of uniting all thatis separate occurs.

—GLORIA ANZALDÚA

Two Guardians

My words were sent underground to where the toggle switch detonates.That was the glare our voices were avoiding. There was something also

broken about the obedience of this retainer. The arcades weren’tsemaphores just because the arrows leading there facilitated those

of us in line as though reliant on east or west quadrants. The ticketmaster was prone to elide requests from the travelers, the sliding doors

sounded a fanfare for the common man, get faster as thought, or mindthe gaps. What I infer can never altogether establish a space adequate

to the body count. The platform motivates two guardians who wereinstructed in safekeeping to usher me from harm’s way but my stand

point so recedes from this tableau as to acknowledge a footprintperspective. Translucent envelope inside remaindered by the riptide

or such tunnel vision as to warrant arrest. Why I was sent to the netherworld inflicted with no wound. Someone lets fall a pair of zip locks

containing the crystal bliss of this conspiracy; what I had to say wassent, I mentioned this I think already, underground switch and toggle

intended to ignite what I could never bring myself to mean. Wherethe voices were avoiding me—hands outstretched at quarter day to hold

back the beam—was there something broken? I weather compliant. I rally.

Anvil and Bellows

In all manners Mister Tourniquet intoned attention turning to my treatmentMany times ignoredMany times identical to the carbonate castleMany times in tribal paintUnbridled scuttlebutt stargaze releasing childrenPalsied in germinal burst

Surface made of metal Missus Skeleton Key: it’s a cruel copyTantamount to the emotion precinctTantamount to the other story imprintTo the opposite self complete with pigment, actuallyArchaic catalog of chattel and usufructWhose characters include—Professor Blind-Eye-TurningSister Bulletproof JacketReverend Dead Man’s GullyMister Secretary General of the Global Farm Security

Birth lines intersect here with the turnstile attorneysWhose testimony pictograms a timetableInto gossip and gainsays the evidence of animalsSo menaced by what surroundsThese laws with mindful hand and fodderAs to inaugurate the weightless strangerBrothering this imbursementWith alleged orders that stain and stokeThat ever more extricate our ancestorFrom wonders one and all The End

Then the final credits run with life-formsAnd we stray either from intimacyOr the accident partEmerges between miniatureMovement and applicationAusterity and surfaceSuperposition and planeOh river palms and clock faceStairwell and flagstoneAspect of an outlineVerily over LandscapeWith Gazebo addingBethlehem roseOr clump green

Wax-warm layers of synthetic skin,

Meat-muddled anniversaryInvoluntary bromide book bound to inlay the marriage of word pasteAnd tooth pull

Domina, this minion font and frontage

Over putty in pagesReproduced byLower quadrant anvilVertical bellows and antelopeIn upward red

Quick quick! the syllables to stagger

The enumerated forethoughtAs when cobalt woodwinds issue silver pearls

Elevator Invention

Language-learner fearful of error as to pronounce the Americans as partway back from the dead devoid of the primary sources, phrase in semicircle, who could tell by the handwork, lever left by the glass-piece, radiance by flexible curve and grommet. Safebox at the stroke of twelve, and in the Georgian corridors by chance, packs of the catatonic lunge at an impasse, parlor room systemic, medium upright, aria into ectoplasm, new day complications on the October watch, small indulgence in favor of the notary.

Humanoid specimens connected by tubes in the cabinets submerged with the telling of How the Earth, how the morning quadrant waned, cerulean eddies from the logbook. In the submarine breathing, apprehensive sibilants from the sea fern Helvetica upend the seasonal epitaph, the liquid missive exercise to interrogate the colors known to poetry of 1810, or by follicles from the lunar anthem.

I wear the geometer’s monocle when, at the turn of the century, as from the Ironworks where the Great Illusionist performed the spectacle of Jupiter and Mars, on display are a hundred bolts of houndstooth, a tinker’s windup key, some knucklebones as from a butcher, and benzene procured from the corner pharmacist, a squadron of half-moon carriages pulled to the Factory, the fated horses flogged by petty criminals along the overcrowded boulevards so named for the Belle Époque as The Doll Maker’s Dilemma.

Heliocenter unsteadily again, effect that outweighs the impediment, particles of triple fruition from the star clouds in Stalingrad to the enzyme driven mutations that make, as we know them, the senses obsolete, deleterious pattern of code, undulating surge of fluid, the offices of—suddenly everywhere—this heuristic insignia a suspension bridge, my dose of sodium pentothal proliferates a slaughterhouse assembly line to conveyor belt and circular saw and I am every seventh aster.

American Household

Here I’m untethered, or else this American household is.A shame for guest and resident alike, torn asunder,

Immovable, unmoving, horizon line before it closesOn the embankment, which is too a slowing thunder.

Whether cash & cake were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Society of Alternate Belonging
• 2. Amend, Delay, Curve, and Disquiet
• 3. Kill Time Objective
• List of Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments