Tara Ballard

“The miles spent in flight”: Inheritance and Memory in Ángel García’s Indifferent Cities

            The past tense cannot be used to describe the disappearance of beloveds from their families and communities across the United States. Forced disappearances are ongoing and they worsen daily, given the blanket approvals, increased funding, and ideology purported by the party currently in power. Every day, there are more videos of dear ones being kidnapped, being taken away to the euphemistically termed “detention centers.” The migration of peoples has been condemned as abnormal, criminal, or demonstrative of unworthiness by the present administration, all of which is antithetical to the veracity of movement: Movement is tied to our human existence and has long transcended artificial outlines concocted by nation-states. The concept of stagnation is deployed to benefit capitalist structures made normative, where elites accrue wealth from our remaining-in-place to serve as laborers. It must also be stated that, as Harsha Walia expresses in Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, the movement of peoples is closely tied to conditions of inequity and conflict created by empires like the United States. In other words, and more specifically, as Walia articulates, “[t]he US-Mexico border [in particular] must be understood not only as a racist weapon to exclude migrants and refugees, but as foundationally organized through, and hence inseparable from, imperialist expansion, Indigenous elimination, and anti-Black enslavement” (21).

As I read the news and scroll through videos of disappearances posted by friends and neighbors, I find myself searching for something to cling to, to guide me through a radical practice of hope, wherein hope is grounded in the real, in that of inquiry, and the desire to see clearly: to perceive: to understand. This practice of hope rejects the narratives purported by the nation-state and instead seeks to establish a historicized way of knowing and being; this practice of hope, indeed, is present through the pages of Indifferent Cities, the new collection of poetry from Ángel García, slated for publication by Tupelo Press in December 2025. Recipient of the inaugural Helena Whitehill Book Award, García’s Indifferent Cities, from his first poem to his last, addresses the many inheritances received from one’s parents, which includes not only the complexity of intimate relationships, of family conflict and resolution, but also that of silences, language, and connections to and across landscapes. It is through this examination of ancestral and geographic distances—in considering his own family’s heritage and movement and all that he does not yet himself realize—that García’s poems pull me, as one reader, into thought:

What I could not have

said then, and what I’m certain of now, is that what

we shared between us in the quiet, was mostly quiet,

when all I wanted was older than fire itself: the stories

my father never told of who he was and where we

came from, stories I feared, he was unable, or worse,

unwilling to tell. Memory is not a complaint, but even

then, just a little boy, silence was something I did

not want to inherit. (“Kindling”)

Indifferent Cities is organized in six sections, with a prefatory and concluding poem housed beyond the chapters themselves, which provides readers with space to pause and digest the pathway of meanings and uncoverings, as evident in the initial poem, “Cenotes,” with its powerful statement (“que estas frágiles traducciones nos acerquen / tanto como puedan”) and the symbolism of a single image, conjured by the title’s reference to natural sinkholes or depressions that form when the roof of a limestone cave collapses only to reveal below a pool of fresh water, like those located throughout the Yucatán Peninsula. From section to section, García’s poems in Spanish and English span more than a century, reflecting upon stories passed down by family members that trace to 1855, to 1925, and lead the speaker to the poems’ present: 2023. In this, the poems look back in order to look forward and better see the now with both clarity and precision. The core of the collection revolves around imagined narratives of the speaker’s grandmother and grandfather, along with their contemporaries and their own parents, García’s great-grandparents. In depicting their existence through imagery and story, García searches for understanding, not only of their lives and their respective movements, traversing across internal and external borders, but, too, of their continued impact on his own life today, as a father and son.   

Throughout the collection, García deftly weds together form and content, in that the stanzaic structures themselves inform the subject matter depicted upon the page. The use of diptychs and triptychs, read as contrapuntals, in addition to strophied long poems (like the incredible “Those Graves,” “Brownsville, 1980” and “Postales (1925)”), ekphrastic pieces, epistolary and apostrophic verses (such as “Dear Fake Father and Fake Mother”), prose poems, Q&As, centos, sonnets, conceptual ghazals, and exploded forms, amplifies the speaker’s track of inquiry, his search for documentation, and the growth of an intimate archive. Likewise, García’s use of white space defies expectations and demonstrates an electrifying approach to stanza breaks, wherein the chosen lines and gatherings of lines maintain a mutually beneficial relationship to not emptiness, but white space as carefully demarcated contemplation, as the not yet known or the quiet on the tongue when one acquires language, and with it, an environment of traditions. In poems like “Progreso, 2023,” for example, García stretches lines across the page and varies the indentation of stanzas, so, like human migration, the poem itself is engaged with movement as it wrestles with manifestations of absence. The poem reads:

            In the cemeterio municipal,

                                    where [    ] might be buried

                        I lose [    ] between the rows of graves.

                                    To not disturb the dead,

                                                            I text

                                                Where are [    ]?

            …

            I’m tempted to run my hands

                                    Along the church walls

                        but don’t

                                    afraid of what

                                                I won’t feel

                                    I’ve come with so much

                                                            desire to find [    ]

                    meanwhile, I’m losing [    ]. (12)

Ángel García’s Indifferent Cities is a book that searches, imagines, and considers the vast terrain of knowing and unknowing, all of which is necessary to better our contemporary existence, at the level of the personal and communal. García’s poems examine the inheritances of family and landscape, of nation-state and language, in order to reveal the complexities of lived experiences amid a network of borders. Through poems rich in narrative and sensory detail, García evinces the significance of questioning and listening, alongside that of documentation, even when challenging or uncertain: “If you’re wondering now, / what          meant. Me too. When we continued to walk along the river, you could have / confused its current for someone crying. It wasn’t my         . It wasn’t me. It was only    ” (“Partial Interview”). In each poem, García writes with vulnerability, with care, and I see myself re-reading his poems out of urgent necessity. As the United States continues to separate, incarcerate, and disappear, I will, with gratefulness, return to Indifferent Cities for all that García provides, and in that, a determination to hope—knowing that poetry such as his is doing important and essential work.