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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.
Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody’s collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past.
Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn's 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.
Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody’s collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past.
Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn's 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.
- GenresPoetryLatinxNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 29, 2020
This is an intelligent piece of literature but also an incredible work of art. As an instructor, I've introduced this book and taught from this book to both beginner and experienced writers, where we explored elements of found texts & they way the writer can make connections across cultures/ historical landscapes ie the historical similarities in regards of the plight between the Black & Mexican body. Borderland Apocrypha is dense, but completely necessary and I can see it easily being taught to high schoolers & adults for you teachers out there.
May 19, 2023
An ambitious work of multimedia counterpoetics & speculative history, that ultimately accomplishes all it set out to do and more. Cody is endlessly inventive with form and language while also capturing the reader in a brutal suite of narratives difficult to look away from. I particularly enjoyed the challenges to notions of spectatorship and complicity, as Cody's work continuously demands we look - look away - look - ask: why are we looking / what are we (who?) to do?
March 24, 2024
Fantastic poetry book. The last poem especially, and namesake of the collection, is absolutely incredible.
March 25, 2020
A fractal imagination makes order of the disordering done by the hanging tree in Orange, TX 1888. In this collection, the trauma of the land and its people exist both in form and language—it’s performed and forces you to witness GIF with sound and no pause button. It is incisions and stitchings, careful. It’s its own treaty of memories that takes and gives but ultimately leaves you in a constant state of rendering.
December 20, 2025
this poetry collection is one of the most uniquely formatted pieces of writing i've ever read. cody's poems border on experimental text-based art, and he places an emphasis on the visual aspect of poetry as i have not seen in other poets. its hard to articulate what "experimental" really means in the context of this poem, but if you read or google any of cody's poems you will understand what i mean. the text wraps around itself, overlaps, is scattered across the page, warps with images, is left blank, is in spanish, and so much more!! truly inventive writing.
the central theme of this collection is on navigating the mexi-cali borderlands. on the whole the work's political themes are very very strong and intense; the collection takes on less of an autobiographical approach and more broadly discusses race, ethnicity, white privilege and power, lynchings, death, oppression, law and order, and other themes (that are of a similar vibe to these). i couldn't read too much of the collection at once, and i found that if i read too much at a go i started skimming the pages and not really processing the words. that being said, the poetry was always very very well written, with some super creative imagery.
something that this collection didn't do for me, however, was create an emotional reaction in me. i'm not sure if its because i don't personally relate to the themes that it depicts, but at some points the collection did border quite academic and almost clinical, and i felt myself losing the ability to really relate to the words. this could be a medium thing (it does more for me to emotionally connect with poetry), or it could be a structure thing (some of the formatting was quite intense to navigate, and that might have eaten into some of the capacity i might have had for emotion).
nonetheless, this was really a one-of-a-kind collection, and cody is a one-of-a-kind poet. i picked up this book because my professor in my literature poetry class showed the class one of his poems and i was so taken by it because i had never seen poetry like that before, and this sentiment extends to this collection.
the central theme of this collection is on navigating the mexi-cali borderlands. on the whole the work's political themes are very very strong and intense; the collection takes on less of an autobiographical approach and more broadly discusses race, ethnicity, white privilege and power, lynchings, death, oppression, law and order, and other themes (that are of a similar vibe to these). i couldn't read too much of the collection at once, and i found that if i read too much at a go i started skimming the pages and not really processing the words. that being said, the poetry was always very very well written, with some super creative imagery.
something that this collection didn't do for me, however, was create an emotional reaction in me. i'm not sure if its because i don't personally relate to the themes that it depicts, but at some points the collection did border quite academic and almost clinical, and i felt myself losing the ability to really relate to the words. this could be a medium thing (it does more for me to emotionally connect with poetry), or it could be a structure thing (some of the formatting was quite intense to navigate, and that might have eaten into some of the capacity i might have had for emotion).
nonetheless, this was really a one-of-a-kind collection, and cody is a one-of-a-kind poet. i picked up this book because my professor in my literature poetry class showed the class one of his poems and i was so taken by it because i had never seen poetry like that before, and this sentiment extends to this collection.
August 21, 2021
2020 National Book Award Finalist
Much like "DMZ Colony", another NBA finalist from this past year, "Borderland" is an impressive project that is more of a meta-genre project than a typical collection of poems. It addresses in large part historical atrocities that have been perpetrated by Americans to Mexicans, particularly following the wars between the two countries as the US pushed their borderline south.
Cody creates his poems from a combination of historical snippets of descriptions from these events along with his reactions, in both English and Spanish. What makes his pieces particularly unique is how they are presented in a kind of graph template, sometimes indicating a timeline or flowchart. It's an impressive style that visually looks like a purely factual historical representation of these events, until you read the words which dart into meditations, into parallel allusions to similar atrocities committed against Mexicans today, and often into Spanish. Often the written portion is divided into columns, which can seem to have some meaning regardless of what direction you read them in (but seem to be meant to be read left to right as if there were clear lines on the page).
The format is very similar to "DMZ Colony" in its mix of media and blend of the historical and personal. I found myself wanting to be more affected that I actually was. The activist aspect of this collection is good and important it kept me looking for that hook that would take me deeper, but it never clicked for me. Perhaps the format ends up creating more of a distance from the subject matter. Perhaps that is Cody's intent. However, I struggled a bit completing this read. That said, I will be on the lookout for other work by Cody.
Much like "DMZ Colony", another NBA finalist from this past year, "Borderland" is an impressive project that is more of a meta-genre project than a typical collection of poems. It addresses in large part historical atrocities that have been perpetrated by Americans to Mexicans, particularly following the wars between the two countries as the US pushed their borderline south.
Cody creates his poems from a combination of historical snippets of descriptions from these events along with his reactions, in both English and Spanish. What makes his pieces particularly unique is how they are presented in a kind of graph template, sometimes indicating a timeline or flowchart. It's an impressive style that visually looks like a purely factual historical representation of these events, until you read the words which dart into meditations, into parallel allusions to similar atrocities committed against Mexicans today, and often into Spanish. Often the written portion is divided into columns, which can seem to have some meaning regardless of what direction you read them in (but seem to be meant to be read left to right as if there were clear lines on the page).
The format is very similar to "DMZ Colony" in its mix of media and blend of the historical and personal. I found myself wanting to be more affected that I actually was. The activist aspect of this collection is good and important it kept me looking for that hook that would take me deeper, but it never clicked for me. Perhaps the format ends up creating more of a distance from the subject matter. Perhaps that is Cody's intent. However, I struggled a bit completing this read. That said, I will be on the lookout for other work by Cody.
October 11, 2025
Incredibly interesting use of form and a great example of bringing research into poetry. I think most poets could learn something from this collection
November 14, 2022
'the men
nonebrown
nonekin
noneyou
gather at the tree
the verdict
verdit
ver/dit
truth/saying
the newspaper omits
omittere
ob/mittere
toward/mission
toward/meith
toward/remove'
(p62, from 'A Vigilance Committee of Jurors, a Mexican Lynching, 1848-present'
nonebrown
nonekin
noneyou
gather at the tree
the verdict
verdit
ver/dit
truth/saying
the newspaper omits
omittere
ob/mittere
toward/mission
toward/meith
toward/remove'
(p62, from 'A Vigilance Committee of Jurors, a Mexican Lynching, 1848-present'
June 12, 2024
There is something remarkable about Cody’s uses of form. Every section of the book charts the work across the page, across the entire book spread. Like the page is more than the “field” Olson advocated for in his “Projective Verse.” It’s a canvas, where the language reposes, as evidence (often as documentary record), of the violence that is innate to border culture. The opening section sets the book’s frame with the poem cascading down from the title, deriving the poem from portions of the title. Enforcing the poetic position of Cody’s fragment.
I would argue Cody’s deep interest is in prying the language apart, to see how the parts of language “add up,” so to speak. As with many docupoetic projects, the underlying statement is: “This material has been here all along.” Why haven’t we been more careful looking at it? Or, as Cody’s visual composition might say it, “Have you not seen this?” Where the fragment acts as wedge, but the poem is also threading all the fragments together. Which makes me think of Beast Meridian, its interest in cultural oppression as a large coercive force, but also the individual’s experience of that force being singular. Like there’s this way Cody presents the bias Mexican people are having to deal with, and its presentation as objective fact, but the objectivity of it shouldn’t remove its impact on him. He experiences the racism that is a byproduct of this history, and the quieting of this history by dominant culture. To think, then, of how the words of a sentence could be considered the individual people, and the sentence could be the racist bias, and how the sentence would land on individual words in different ways, but the sentence still leads to the same statement.
And most of it fits with the poem’s notion that coalescing is one thing a poem makes available. How these different impressions might come together. And how they’re substantiated by official policy. The erasure of “The Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement,” which may or may not be a real treaty, but which is even characterized as something that led to a lynching, is a great example of the “apocrypha” of the book’s title. And how even falsehoods tend to have their own position.
I would argue Cody’s deep interest is in prying the language apart, to see how the parts of language “add up,” so to speak. As with many docupoetic projects, the underlying statement is: “This material has been here all along.” Why haven’t we been more careful looking at it? Or, as Cody’s visual composition might say it, “Have you not seen this?” Where the fragment acts as wedge, but the poem is also threading all the fragments together. Which makes me think of Beast Meridian, its interest in cultural oppression as a large coercive force, but also the individual’s experience of that force being singular. Like there’s this way Cody presents the bias Mexican people are having to deal with, and its presentation as objective fact, but the objectivity of it shouldn’t remove its impact on him. He experiences the racism that is a byproduct of this history, and the quieting of this history by dominant culture. To think, then, of how the words of a sentence could be considered the individual people, and the sentence could be the racist bias, and how the sentence would land on individual words in different ways, but the sentence still leads to the same statement.
And most of it fits with the poem’s notion that coalescing is one thing a poem makes available. How these different impressions might come together. And how they’re substantiated by official policy. The erasure of “The Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement,” which may or may not be a real treaty, but which is even characterized as something that led to a lynching, is a great example of the “apocrypha” of the book’s title. And how even falsehoods tend to have their own position.
March 20, 2021
A strange book with an annoying format--hard to hold, and hard to read with extra-long lines when pages have extra-long lines. Newspaper clippings that are virtually illegible but (seemingly?) important to the text. A weird Glenn Beck-ish style that I don't think was done ironically. Censoring/removing nearly all words from official documents does not reveal any true meaning.
This book is about the poor treatment (from public mocking to lynchings) of Mexicans by the United States/Americans after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Which is interesting because Mexico/Spain was itself a colonizer. P 156 (Notes): "The ability to forget, reshape, and erase the histories of "the other" and the atrocities committed against "the other" by the United States, its agents and citizens, allow these acts to become part of the fabric of the nation." Yet that is exactly what he has done by framing Mexicans living in newly acquired territories as only victims, and also as the only victims. Only in the acknowledgements does the author recognize the native peoples--and only those who lived on the specific lands he has lived in and written on.
I have now read all 10 2020 NBA Poetry longlisted books. This would rank 9th for me. Interestingly, the author of my 10th is thanked by this author. I don't believe any of the others appear in his acknowledgements (though there are lots of names in these hard-to-read long lines, I might have missed someone else!).
This book is about the poor treatment (from public mocking to lynchings) of Mexicans by the United States/Americans after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Which is interesting because Mexico/Spain was itself a colonizer. P 156 (Notes): "The ability to forget, reshape, and erase the histories of "the other" and the atrocities committed against "the other" by the United States, its agents and citizens, allow these acts to become part of the fabric of the nation." Yet that is exactly what he has done by framing Mexicans living in newly acquired territories as only victims, and also as the only victims. Only in the acknowledgements does the author recognize the native peoples--and only those who lived on the specific lands he has lived in and written on.
I have now read all 10 2020 NBA Poetry longlisted books. This would rank 9th for me. Interestingly, the author of my 10th is thanked by this author. I don't believe any of the others appear in his acknowledgements (though there are lots of names in these hard-to-read long lines, I might have missed someone else!).
November 15, 2020
This collection is remarkable in so many ways but, above all, in how Cody breaks poems open—showing a variety of poem shapes on a page, further knowledges words can contain, in ways that evoke (but don't merely copy) the work of Doug Kearney and others. Cody uses image, quotation, and an array of poem formats to consider the violences enacted on Mexicans by whites, including the rarely discussed history of lynching of Mexicans in the US. The uncomfortable nearness of these histories—both chronologically and symbolically—is something Cody approaches with unremitting power. But the book contains so much beyond this. It is an exploration of language's role in society, of text's role in a book. It illustrates the multitudinous ways a poem can be.
April 22, 2021
Groundbreaking. Earth-shattering. There aren't enough words to describe the work of the collective totality of this collection - in part an anti-colonial historical poetic reckoning, in part the birth of new language entirely. Writing from the Palestinian diaspora myself, I learn so much from Cody’s work - visually, formally, politically. How to Hold language despite the atrocities of English, its troubled history. Here is a poetics which not merely deconstructs the notion of a border, but imagines a better elsewhere beyond the borders of page & margin, beyond the illegitimate borders of this failed notion of a country. This collection demands capital R Reading.
August 8, 2023
A beautiful and haunting collection of poetry reflecting on the border and what it means to be Latinx in America. Cody uses stunning and inventive physical representations that warp his work which add more layers than the words themselves. This includes blackout, dashed lines, sentences that flow down and across and every which way. It’s been months and I still think about what he wrote. An important read for anyone for a basis of understanding the history of lantinx treatment and how it is reflected today.
September 22, 2020
Alongside Diana Khoi Nguyen's earlier "Ghost Of," this is some of the most formally audacious design in poem layout and structure, speaking toward a new language and prose to capture historical indignities. Presently longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in poetry, it's the sort of collection that establishes the vibrancy of a voice well worth following.
December 13, 2020
Reviewed this for RHINO poetry...
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.
More here: https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/borde...
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.
More here: https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/borde...
April 25, 2020
This book is here. it’s telling in the language of pain, of the open veins, of the labyrinth that continues to exist. It is an important book that languages history, future, present. A must must read.
January 13, 2021
these are poems that feel like they will echo in my mind for years and years. every poem carries its own shade of pain, every word is so well placed and every fragment of historical reference so perfectly incorporated. stunning, need to reread soon.
April 21, 2021
It was so beautiful.
May 25, 2021
A very unique and unusual book with a lot of somewhat obscure and difficult creative writing, much of which is visual poetry.
November 5, 2021
This book has a lot of really smart stuff going on, but sometimes it felt too hard to figure out what I was supposed to be getting from some of these poems and/or their spacing.
3/5
3/5
June 24, 2023
This is inventive and daring and structurally compelling and heartbreaking and intellectual and somatic.
January 10, 2024
WOW. Incredibly ambitious, creative, and brilliant poetry. He plays with the space on the page like it’s a canvas and layers meaning into every blot of ink.
December 13, 2024
Such a gorgeous collection
February 18, 2025
Analyzed some of this for my poetry class then immediately ordered the book. The unique form, content, and visuals are fantastic.
November 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews