Mirrors for Gold

by Roberto Tejada

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. MIRRORS FOR GOLD was written in Mexico City from 1988 to 1992. Today these poems speak directly-perhaps moreso given the time elapsed-to historical duration and the vicissitudes of cultural certainty. The title poem, a numbered series of fifteen pieces, examines the borders between and influences of political climate and intimacy. In the ever-receding present of MIRRORS OF GOLD, human debility and bodily promise play out an opulent scenario of surrender and defiance. Tejada teaches Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego, where he is faculty in the Visual Arts Department.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

An art historian, curator, and editor specializing in Latino and Latin American art, Roberto Tejada earned a BA in comparative literature from New York University and a PhD in interdisciplinary media studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. From 1987 to 1997 Tejada lived in Mexico City, where he served on the editorial board of the magazine Vuelta and was executive editor of Artes de México. He founded and co-edits the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. A former professor at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, and Southern Methodist University, Tejada was appointed the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in 2014.

Reviews

[Matthew M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A. The allure of many Tejada’s poems can be found in their dramatization of the sexual, of desire in its almost primal stage as in prose poem #6 from the section “Mirrors For Gold.” This is not to say that his poems bespeak an identity laden environment of shifting sexual tension that has often been played out under the banner of identity politics in a variety of genres within contemporary writing. His poems don’t so much concretize desire as universal phenomenon, but rather, as he states elsewhere: “I’m interested in how other identities shape and conform my identity, and where my sexual identity overlaps, or is traversed, or intruded by, or caressed by cultural difference and other cultural identities.” This statement is interesting for the implicit claim that Tejada presents as inter-cultural and social at root.

B. Mirror For Gold opens with the poem “Prologue: The Gaunlet,” which begins “These awful houses to father us in poetry/These severed fingers human ice/elusive pure mental absolute[.]” This kind of declarative voice and following language play is one that frequently appears throughout the poems in a manner where sound and sense merge to articulate a poetics of longing and loss. This is all managed in a space which grounds the physical and mental until the “variables/of the body//are at last/resolved [.]” The physicality of the body is at the least connected with a larger community, where family and intruder desire the act of naming “to forge/a stay so that//the very gestures/of its rank fabric//are not entirely /unbearable.”

C. The “frail pulses along/folds of the earth” give voice to a public address that’s as much concerned with writing on the page, as in the transmission of language from one person to another. Language is imagined as reciprocal relationship with the other. “This,/Unless reciprocal, is meaningless.”

D. Other poems such as “The Division,” call attention to our social constructs which are finally not so much modern as blithely inherited from more primitive orders as in “that weird/unreadable geography of intersecting circles/which had marked us//to begin with, that is,/in the first place, federal memory/your absolute Law and the daughter nothing/of what our work had been [.]” The division that the poem conjures, involves the idea of the state, which may be read as in inorganic entity rather than as a beneficent producer of justice, and its conflict with local concern. Here, the emphasis on “public” and “power” that pervades much of the poems in one way or another, can’t resist a thorough glance onto the imperial world map through an imaginative structure that draws on the New Testament, as well as Mayan culture.

E. Moreover, while the poems in Mirrors For Gold are “never autochthonous,” any attempt (desire) to erect a dwelling one might call home is responded to with a “civic indifference.” As in the poem “Federal District,” “the reckless/velocity of the social//--insurgent thoroughfare/only narrowly//endured without some/pale refreshment[.]” These lines both conceal and reveal, in the written and vocal, an image by way of reflection from a mirror, the “imperfect mutterings” of a violent speech “analogous with//the/millennium.”

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"14. To become my own father you came to me once before the mirror on a train the hashish sweet to the lips and nostrils upon exhaling my lung through the orifice so that it glistened warm in the white sink good riddance my thrill my anonym."

[Julieann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tejada is too hot!