The Verging Cities

Mountain/West Poetry Series

by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s gripping debut collection, The Verging Cities, is filled with explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels in the domestic sphere. Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas.

The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

Genres: Poetry, Latinx

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2015

About the author

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of The Verging Cities, which won the Great Lakes Colleges' Association New Writers Award, the National Association of Chicana/o Studies Poetry Award, and was featured as a top ten debut by Poets and Writers (June 2015). A 2015 CantoMundo fellow, her poems have appeared in American Poets, The Believer, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, The Best American Poetry 2015, and more. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Reviews

[Maddie C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the most candid, raw and unapologetic contemporary poet I've ever read.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

a debut collection where violence against, from, and through the us-mexico border is focal, though i think many of the extended metaphors that pointed inward—especially as relates to the speaker and their lover's bodies—became nonsensical and awkward for me. the standout poems here: "Angel & I," "Like Victorian Women," and "Endnotes on Ciudad Juárez." so not much. powerful subject matter, with the caveat that the delivery didn't often connect for me.

i've been enjoying natalie scenters-zapico's more recent (standalone) poems, so i'm interested to see how my opinions evolve as i move through her later collections. 2.7/5.

[Abby]

These are love poems--good love poems about good love--and God, they also hurt. It's El Paso-Juarez, and these cities and deserts get into your body. They get into your love. If bodies are bordered then you cross, are stopped from crossing, would die to cross, would die rather than cross--but also, explain to me again why bodies have to be bordered? "I wouldn't trust this land / with existential questions."

[Maria Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing debut poetry book. As someone who is from the border, who was born in Ciudad Juarez, and raised in El Paso, I think this is a loving, honest and respectful depiction of the border. I really appreciate that Natalie doesn't only dwell in the violence and brutality of the border, but finds a way to interweave love and relationships, delivering a nuanced depiction of la frontera. As a poet, I really appreciate her love poems. It's so hard to write about love without coming across as cliche, but she does it so well in poems like "how borders are built." This is a very well balanced book, she does not shy away from the harshness of the border but also manages to write with compassion and humanity in a way that does not feel exploitative. I also love that she delves into magical realism, and brings us some really amazing, and unexpected images, with poems like "Succulence" and "Angel falls from the sky... " A truly talented poet.

My convo with the poet - http://sinkingcitylitmag.com/a-conver...

[Jonathan Tennis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read about this poet in a recent article in Poets & Writers. Didn’t work for me but there were a few I enjoyed: angel & I, Because you don’t have a social security number, Endnotes on Ciudad Juarez.

“No pillows, only thoughts of frozen fish fertilizing / the tomato plants, thoughts of bulls disappeared / from their pastures, thoughts of fingers hidden / in the glove box. Angel cries so I use my wedding band / to collect his tears, but hollow rings hold nothing.” – p. 63 (from Angel & I are both great pretenders)

“A city of fallen angels, each one a collection / of human arms and legs, a torso, and / bleeding mouth. I knew when immigration / arrested you, when I had to pay a fine / for ever having loved you, that they would / take our one bedroom, our washer and dryer— / anything of value. But how was I to know / that even God would push your frail form / from the sky?” – p. 51 (from Angels fall from the sky to El Paso, Texas)

[Emily]

"Some say you have no right to talk about the dead. / So I talk of them as living, their bodies standing in the street's bend."

[Sylvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lately, there is such pain in speaking,/ I think someone wants me quiet" says Scenters-Zapico in her debut collection The Verging Cities, but not even pain stops the author from speaking and bringing to light the bodies, the words, the clothes, the limbs, the stories, of those who inhabit the verging land: the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border.

These poems are a political and an emotional statement, these poems are brutal and lethal, these poems are charged with personal stories and histories, they are driven by intimacy and love, oh, so much love because only one who loves the verging cities is capable to see it as what it is: a body broken. The Verging Cities is a living proof that "It doesn't matter the country--the desert is all the same,"

Natalie Scenters-Zapico opens wounds that, we all know, never heal.

[17CECO]

This is a tenacious collection, circling around bodies, borders, Juarez, El Paso, and, most poignantly, the borders between them -- as a space in and of itself. On their own, many of the poems might seem clipped short but the tight focus of the collection gives them, together, an impressive accretive emotional and intellectual force. It's final image, of the dead--not the generic zombies of horror movies--but the dead we've met in this collection, the people of Mexico and Juarez, reunite with the living by breaking down a border fence sticks w/me, flashes up every time I cross the border, with ease, into Canada.

This morning
everyone in the cities is alive again.

Their eyes open to the sun,
their fingers collapsing
chain, link by link.

[Poupeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

painful, heartbreaking, deeply humane...
if interested in issues of bodies and borders, this is a gem of a book.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entre nosotros, la frontera. Borders verge upon us, converge and split, and what they leave in the sundering is more than the sum of their skeletal, sanguinary parts. In poems that document desire between a wife and husband, alongside a fracturing, living archive of the land between two cities -- Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas -- lie the roots of (un)belonging, what it means to live in exile from one’s own place, own tierra.

“You whisper: I can’t die here, I wanted

to fall on the live side of the border.
And I know it isn’t your voice
I’m hearing but I take your severed hands
and carry them across to Juárez anyway.

I breathe bone as I cross -- your blood running
to my elbows. I breathe. I breathe
to exchange your body for an explanation.
I breathe. No one says a word; I breathe.”

19/31
#TheSealeyChallenge

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw and powerful. I love surrealism, so that was an interesting and fun aspect of this collection—if anything depicting the darkness of the immigrant experience can be fun. Many of the images and all of the emotion in these poems will stick with me for a long time. They are gritty and real and help me understand. I wish the pain in these pages didn’t exist, but I’m so grateful for Natalie Scenters-Zapico revealing it in all its terrors. It has made me more aware of what our sisters and brothers are experiencing at the borders and beyond.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short collection is a love poem to broken borders, blood left in the sand, bones whittled dry by institutionalized racism and imperialism. It is gritty, smash your face like an ICE agent level of gratuitous violence. Within the violence, there is humanity, there are people trying to find love, relationships and hope. Stirring deep emotions as tumultuous as the borderlands, Verging Cities is a winning collection.

[Brenna Gomez · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful and haunting book. Many of the poems are surreal, I think, because it's the only way to comprehend the magnitude of the violence at the border. The violence created by borders. The book is expertly arranged by thematic sections (con/verge, di/verge, re/merge, verge) that speak to deportation, femicide, marriage, family, and citizenship. The collection builds to the last poem, which I found--somehow--both hopeful and devastating.

[Caitlin]

The border is construct and violence, a theme which runs through Natalie Scenters-Zapico's heartbreaking, beautiful borderlands poetics The Verging Cities, an exploration of the twin cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, both shrouded in fog, both bleeding. The shame and pain of xenophobia and la migra intertwine with defiance, a sharp, painful, beautiful reminder of the humanity on both sides of the border.

[Jessika · Rating 4 out of 5]

The energy in this collection is astounding.

[esmé · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the honor of interviewing the author via zoom in my poetry class!

[Shira · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars--so beautiful and raw.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Adriana Martinez Figueroa]

The Verging Cities is a collection of the violence that's overt and implicit. There are many things left unsaid, allowing the reader to create their own conclusions as to what the writing is about, much different to Lima :: Limón. Here, the reader must read between the lines: is the lack of overt violence in this piece mean there isn't an act of violence happening? No piece makes it more obvious than "A JOURNALIST’S FIELD NOTES ON THE KENTUCKY CLUB" which details a supposed journalist's foray into a Juarez club, and in every line they're expecting something bad to happen to themselves, overhearing atrocities happening to marginalized communities; but since the violence isn't directed towards them, the journalist is disappointed. Scenters-Zapico says with her poetry, "how much of our trauma must we bleed for it to suffice and be seen as valid?" The writer blends in fictional and real, confuses the reader enough for us to think if what she writes about happened or not. In turn, she replies, does it matter; if you believe it's real then it's probably happening to someone, so what are you gonna do about it?
Most of all, this collection is a story of the US Mexico border, particularly of Juárez. It is protagonist and ghost. It is victim and survivor. It is chain link and as real as every detained person. The Verging City is about the sun beating down on the border, and the dangers that lurk in the night. It is witnessing generational trauma be revisited upon an already traumatized body.
Anyway, Natalie Scenters-Zapico for a Nobel Prize in Literature when???

[Tori · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Verging Cities is very much a contemporary poetry book. It offers a very hard, graphic image for the reader to comprehend but the meaning behind each poem is very necessary and very relevant.

For me, this book was on par with rupi kaur's and Warsaw Shire's poetry. It is brutal, it is honest, and it hides no emotions. For the border reader, for those trying to understand, and for others who want an honest look, this is the poetry book for you.

[Tam Sothonprapakonn]

I don't consider myself a person qualified to evaluate poetry in a constructive/productive way. I will, however, contend that this collection indeed checks out. It manages to maintain a bleak atmosphere of its own: a precarious borderland which reeks of perpetual violence and death, but also nurtures vital signs of life and hope.