Abstract

'borderself' is a collection of poems haunted by borders. It investigates different types of human fault lines: bureaucracies, customs rituals, stamps of naturalized/foreign, accents, slips of the tongue, intersectional words and worlds. It is written from a Latinx perspective but without romanticizing Portuguese/Spanish/French as more legitimate spaces than English, which raises the question: does one have a 'native' language if their first voice is a colonial byproduct? 'borderself' is interested in language loss/gain/overdub and the spaces for complex identities such layering opens. Besides language, 'borderself' implicates poetic forms and the relationship between speaker and reader—exposing traditional forms as non-neutral spaces with historical privileges and questioning who has the right to speak for whom. Implication is seen as a practice of accountability that begets solidarity and makes new poetic forms possible. Structurally, apart from a prologue and a coda, 'borderself' has three main parts: (1) a series of 'xelf' poems dramatizing speakers caught between borders; (2) 'DANTE'S BUREAU', a prosimetrum linking the origins of bureaucratic and poetic forms; (3) 'The death of Jean Charles de Menezes and footnotes after Lorca', a long poem employing footnotes to dispute official accounts of state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against immigrants. The 'Propersitions' prologue invites the reader into disorientation as a method. The coda, titled 'Salutation to the Border', reflects back to the 'xelf' poems by turning their essential rhythms into a yoga series—a score of instructions on how to move through or breathe within borders.