Album of Fences

Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jose Antonio Villar n. "Omar Pimienta documents what living on either side of a militarized border does to a community, how it distorts, breeding suspicion and lies. Here a father brags he has always crossed using a false ID, never through the desert, and a son crosses easily once he has (or claims to have?) a job building destroyers. Here a guard demands that a woman breastfeed an infant she's carrying to prove that it's hers. Pimienta allows ironies and horrors to speak for themselves -- and they do. Loud and clear."--Rae Armantrout

"In ALBUM OF FENCES, Omar Pimienta writes the membranes that thrive between the sensed-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed hyper-real of the culturally emergent. His vision isn't of an epiphany variety, but rather is borne of a subtle constructivist process of cultural shiftaramas. Writ large into being are alter-selves that get marked up to what Guillermo Gomez Pe a has called, 'the mainstream bizarre.' Nimbly threading History's objects ('nation', 'family', 'selfhood', 'city', 'work world' 'friends'), Pimienta guides us into and out of a Borderland Capture-Zone. The result is a transnational, infra-biographical holography that sets the stage for a lived-life poetics. The creative tension between 'biography' and public myth--is nothing short of dazzling."--Rodrigo Toscano

"Pimienta is an alchemist of memory, turning simple snapshots into legends, fathers into brothers, heroes and ghosts. His Tijuana is not a wall but a magic portal."--Mike Davis