Verging Cities

Verging becomes crucial to the ways Natalie Scenters-Zapico plays with form in her poems. Compared to other poets that we have read this semester the use of vergence in form has been one of the most astonishing to me. Each poem holds its own narrative and experience and the way some poem titles bleed into the piece is a depiction of how borders can simultaneously be created and destroyed. I especially found Scenters-Zapico use of scenes as a form to be very critical to rhetoric already surrounding immigration and border control. As a reader, the scene poems was an excellent way of using form to comment on the way migrant stories and lives are processed and packaged. Immigration rhetoric continues to instil violent minimizations of the kinds of torture and trauma administered by government systems. What I really value is that Scenters-Zapico uses the scene poems to convey an array of migrant narratives. None of them are pretty pictures. None of these narratives are digestible. Which they never should be because migration (forced or not) is warfare. It is warfare on an individual's spirit, mental and physical health.

I also fell in love with the cutting imagery in Scenters-Zapacos work…

“You forgot to weed your eyes, so brush/
Has grown wild in your stare.”

“I light the house on fire/
And lie down/
On my kitchen floor to feel the ants search/
The hidden sugars on my body.”

 “We leak letters, small check marks”

 The play on nature and “ink” is commentary of the ecology of the migration process.The language she uses to create these images are so fresh and somehow easy to imagine because they are so specific. She knows exactly what she wants you to see and what she wants you to take away from putting that image in the reader's mind. I don’t think I have ever seen a poet so skillful with imgary is this way. Reading her work is like watching a movie. She does not let you look away and she does not censor any of the many truths that these migration stories hold. Immigration is complex, it has multiple layers and we must respect that the immigrant narrative being fed to us is violence against these individuals.