The Department of Homeland Security recently selected the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, “the crown jewel of the Rio Grande Valley wildlife refuge system,” as the first site for a border wall segment, and the nearby National Butterfly Center is also another possible site for the wall. In it, award-winning poets Aracelis Girmay (author of Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and The Black Maria) and Emmy Pérez (author of Solstice and With the River on Our Face) discuss the shifting nature of identity and of language, the physicality of poetry, and the symbolic and literal implications of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the reality of which is now, seven months later, becoming increasingly inevitable. The short film will be available online.This conversation was started in the summer of 2016 and completed in December of that same year, spanning the end of the campaign season, the elections, and their immediate aftermath. This book carries with it a short film project that incorporates portraiture, collage, and archival footage against a sonic backdrop of Albert Ayler’s “Water Music.” The film means to conjure a “memorialistic” tone that illustrates diverse relationships/juxtapositions of black bodies and bodies of water. In order to write these poems, Girmay researched international law around immigration, immigration rates, and the pressures that push people to attempt these crossings even at the height of astonishing risk. This collection focuses, in part, on this international crisis. Human Rights reports estimate that over 20,000 people have died at sea making the journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa to southern Europe in the past two decades. With the recent rise of national attention to racism, white supremacy, and media tags like #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe, this collection is a timely and necessary look at historical and current realities of blackness within the U.S. In 2015, Girmay was honored with a Whiting Award in Poetry, a prestigious award that carries a $50,000 prize. Girmay's previous BOA title Kingdom Animalia won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and has been a consistent leader in sales, selling more than 3,500 copies since 2011.
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