Exposition Park

by Roberto Tejada

A midway of poetic styles and syllabic tableaux

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 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

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2010

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

[Ross Williamson]

271120: quarantine buddy read #25 with Keagan! neither of us understood this book at all

[Hannah Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to think of another collection that uses breath and blank space on the page quite as well as Tejada's Exposition Park.

"Repeat after me: inhale, awaken, and restrain--Broadcast that forbids to
lay claim on the inflicting source, strap tethered with the intention to in-
cite the flailing self now inferior, now supreme, surrendering endurance
of a body's appetite in pink and black entangled, spent, encased, uncon-
tainable."

[Isaac Salazar · Rating 2 out of 5]

What the fuck was this book!

Sure, it was nice to know that most of these poems are based off of artists and their artwork, but there is so much to be said about the politics of accessibility. Even with the notes, this book did not feel accessible to me. And that’s saying a lot since I’m an undergraduate in college.