Book description
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 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.
