Carbonate of Copper

LONGLISTED, 2026 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

Bringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland

Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line.

The book’s title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed.

Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the COVID-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory, as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.