A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign--Gabriel Palacios

In his debut poetry collection A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign, Gabriel Palacios reckons with the cultural heritage of the Southwest border region by sifting through its detritus: Eighteenth-century mission documents in which ancestors of the author appear, memorializing royal appointments and deaths by childbirth; copper-country “historamas” portraying colonial trespasses; neon signage of roadside motels and malls depicting Native regalia and helmets of conquistadors. These blunted echoes of the violences recorded on the land formerly known as the Pimería Alta comprise a point of meditation for a freewheeling, outsider docupoetry. The embellishments, which take the form of scenes and dioramas, collage temporal perspectives and fill in the elisions and redactions of the documentary record with an imagination uniquely haunted by the absurdity of media representations and historic reenactments.