The Verging Cities

Scenters-Zapico's first collection moves between the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where the poems trace the lives shaped by migration. Its speakers include undocumented men called Angel, and angels that tumble out of the sky and into ordinary homes. Marriage, cartel violence, the killing of women, and the everyday work of living under a shared border all receive attention, showing how national policy reaches down into private lives.

The poems take many shapes, from the sonnet and the wedding song to pieces styled as endnotes and field notes. Each one condenses a hard story about cartel members, migrants, border patrol agents, and couples who love each other while carrying their own wounds. The collection leans into surreal images: mouths hang from ceilings, numbered metal posts stand in for the line between nations and between lovers' spines, and the two cities call to one another through fences that leak nothing but silt.

The book places itself within a tradition of border writing alongside Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea. It also contrasts the safest city in the United States with what has been called the murder capital of the world. Its central idea is the border as a verge, a place where one thing begins and another ends, over and over.