Father / Genocide

“A necessary, urgent, and affecting work.” —Publishers Weekly

“Tamez's poetry disturbs the mind with its bravery of language, musical indictments of culture, and profound good heart. She is one of our great lyric poets. This book is simply wonderful!"
—Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone

On the night before he “walked on,” Margo Tamez's father recorded two questions onto a cassette tape: "Where did all the good men go? Where did they go?" Two decades later, Tamez reconstructs her father's struggle to "be a man" under American domination, tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that he and preceding generations experienced. She reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas through Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance.

"I was raised up in American violence," Tamez writes, "and I have to explore all of its possibilities ..." Her poetry brings out those possibilities by "timebending," with a poetic form Tamez calls "Indigenous fusionism-Indigenous futurism," a union of pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, and familial blood-knowing, Father | Genocide reveals why impunity on the Texas border is the key to understanding American identity violence. Her lightning poetry strikes the nested seeds and unburies the truth of "these bitter lands."