2022 Whiting Award Winner. 2021 American Book Award Winner. 2021 Southwest Book Award Winner.
2020 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry. 2021 PEN/America Jean Stein Award Finalist.
Winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize.
Overview of Borderland Apocrypha
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican—American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America.
Praise for Borderland Apocrypha
“By unpacking legal documents, historical photographs, and newspaper archives, and then synthesizing his insights with his own experiences with racism and prejudice, Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha offers a stunning portrait of the un-neighborly relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. This powerful work of avant-garde docupoetics bears witness to the uncomfortable stories that fortified American expansionism and capitalism—oppressive systems of power whose unjust treatment of the Mexican people continues to resonate into the present.”
2020 National Book Awards Jury Citation
“…inventive, visually sprawling Borderland Apocrypha…“
2020 Poets & Writers Debut Poet
“How does poetry grow, change, answer the present moment? In the work of Anthony Cody, it stretches the form to become what it describes. These are poems about borders and the refusal of borders in which the words themselves are held captive, held back, or pushed to the margins. With boldness and formal dexterity, Cody assembles his spectral poems from official records, guidebooks, works of history, maps, laws and edicts, and the traces of bitter and bloody memory. In this invigorating work, Cody has enlarged what’s possible for American poetry.”
2022 Whiting Award Jury Citation
“Borderland Apocrypha, by Anthony Cody unearths long-ago buried maps, trails, images figures and faces and vibrations of the lost, the hanged and the lynched untold stories of the Mexicans in their own lands occupied and taken — through this fluid text of passionate and first-time-ever exploding typographic design poems. They leap, spiral, singe, crush, crash, condense, tangle & knot & erase and reappear into and out of themselves to scream and arrive at your table, for once to be seen and felt and return in their elegant and ragged vestments of truth. Call these poems, but they are brown bodies & voices, home at last, under the rough light of the world. A grand accomplishment, a mega-prize-winner!”
2021 American Book Award Jury Citation
Blurbs
“Intense feeling, empathy, rage, compassion swerves language, torques the page. History and data inflict. Intelligence composes, sequence wrestles with violence. It must be witnessed, expressed. The love is expression. Witness is form.”
– Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, judge’s citation on Borderland Apocrypha for the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Award
“Read Cody’s investigations, these beyond-poems, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, Mexican Indian lands, the untold occupations of America — as if you are hanging on that open-air killing tree. Notice the vortex of existence, yours, ours, the trapezoids of punishments, the dotted lines and splattered shapes of skin-text and the searing howls cut down the middle of the word bodies, usurpation, rape and theft bursting across the emptiness pages, terminations and exiles pinned on the Race Grid. Open these scrolls and peer at half-humanity America cutting you down, dangling — there is no wall after all, just a mirror of executions, “reach for the hand of a friend” “in a dream”, you are the “savage captured,” the “KickingSingingKickingSinging chant”, you are the segmented ink-jitters on Cody’s pages, you are the “atomic” Brown radiating yourself out of the 1850’s into this present of border mania. Read Cody ’s script, like no other — a photo-zoom of tragic roots and revelations, cartographies of “power and control,” and the transcendence of innocent bodies, somehow — American soul. Cody presents what has not been revealed, what must be said. This one-of-a-kind-book settles all cases against all border-crossers. It is possible: a brave, bold syntax, an unseen intelligence of ourselves, a new America. Bravo for these compassionate and brutal time-spaces, this bristling land voice— an exemplar of a bursting literature. Everything starts over now.”
– Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate Emeritus
“History’s true story is littered with collusions, silences, and with bodies: the dark ecology Anthony Cody brilliantly prosecutes in his debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha. This book creates a new mechanism of critique through its forensic and conspiratorial speaker who gathers the dearth of evidence left behind by imperialism’s worse offenders and parses out a thrilling and trenchant document on the U.S. West’s legacy anti-Mexican bigotry. “The inheritance of the elsewhere is a cave of collapse,” writes Cody in a collection that will change the way we think about recovering histories.”
– Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder
“Because the document is always part of poetry in the general sense Shelley wrote about. Because the concept never did exceed politics or position. Because everything must change. Because the unaccountable, the disavowed, the apocryphal are the only metadata you’ll find in our nudes. Because whiteness is an extractive enterprise. Because patriarchy would look us in the face and think we’ll keep its secrets. Because with this history we’re not trying to accept the choice between having been colonizer or colonized. Because who, if we’re embraced or estranged from whiteness to suit whiteness, would hear us among the racial orders? Because vigilance committees now have Facebook groups, publicly funded military-grade weapons and surveillance technologies. Because our bodies are monetized in private prisons and in political speech. Because we’re not trying to confuse our faces with our masks. Because from the formal exigencies of document and concept, Anthony Cody delivers poetry back to the general sense of ritual and charm, a gnosis that takes its shape at the double edge of the words and the transmitting body. And because everything must change, the transit leads from here to the dead and back.”
– Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse
Reviews
“Focused on immigration, detention, and survival around the U.S.-Mexico border, Cody’s fierce, righteously outraged collection deserves shelf space near other recent monuments of highly political, partly conceptual poetry: M. NourBese Philips’s Zong!, for example, or Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.”
– Stephanie Burt, Books Noted section of The Academy of American Poetry’s Journal “American Poets”, Spring-Summer 2020
“Visual, conceptual, and genre-defying, Cody’s work makes meaning and metaphor not just from language but from diagrams, photos, idea maps, and blank space, such that a poem lineated in regular stanzas feels like an aberration. Laid out in landscape form to accommodate horizontal movement, the book features five distinct sections. “
– Emily Pérez, Rhino Poetry Review Volume 3 No. 6, December 2020
“I think that the book Borderline Apocrypha by the poet Anthony Cody, through the decolonizing of communicative and linguistic conventions, breaking them into what might seem anarchic, is a gushing forth of blood and desire. I see in this book the push to be free in life as in language, expanded resolutely to include many historical and cultural interventions.”
– Niccolo Rocamora Vitug, “Present at the Tectonic” in Singapore Unbound, December 2020
“…Cody tells of personal history and family trauma. Setting poems amid the historical context of the lynching of Mexicans in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, he offers readers insight into a moment that has often been excluded from American history.”
– Ruben Quesada, “These United States: Eight Books by Latinx Poets” in Harvard Review, December 2020