Indifferent Cities

Poems exploring the push and pull of migration and immigration, familial archive, and regional history. Through one state to another, from one country to the next Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least.

Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations. Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, Indifferent Cities wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author’s inevitable return to determine where and to who he belongs.