Natalie Scenters-Zapico, _The Verging Cities_

I WAS TIPPED to this about a year ago by Matthias Svalina, and just recently Scenters-Zapico's new book got noticed in the New Yorker blog. Further evidence, were any required, that Matthias is one great source of poetry tips.

The cities of the title are Scenters-Zapico's hometown(s), El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. The cities "Con/verge," as one section title puts it, in that they are sibling cities, their identity in many ways shared; but they also "Di/verge," as another section title has it, in that a crucial border separates them, landing them in different legal and political domains, with entailed potential for fear, suspicion, hostility, persecution, and even violence.

Juarez's problems with criminal violence, especially against women, are well-known, as is the violence the U.S. government and some of its citizens are willing to inflict on Mexicans crossing the border, and Scenters-Zapico does not spare us repeated glimpses of it, fresh, vivid, and stinging. At the same time, she can be satirical about people who appropriate the violence of her hometowns in order to lend their art a bit of edginess (see "Placements").

The frequent violence of the book serves also to raise the power of its love poems, however. The beloved in the book, Ángel, apparently comes from the city that is the twin of the city the speaker comes from, and love's famous paradox, the twoness that is a oneness, is multiply reflected in the geographical and geopolitical situations of the lovers.

The braiding of the love poetry with the poetry-of-witness, often in the very same poem, is both startling and moving. The settings of love stories is often what we know least about them, and care about the least, but here the setting is crucial.

This is all good--but what matters most is that Scenters-Zapico's poetry stays original and striking line after line: "You forgot to weed your eyes, so brush / has grown wild in your stare."