The Río Bravo, that Tattered Dog with a Wild Gaze by Anthony Seidman

In these poems of hot desert winds and coruscating sands “where tarantulas breed,” Anthony Seidman demonstrates a clarity of vision only delirium can inspire. Like a border-hopping Blake, he sings of innocence and experience, urging us to “bare our dirty teeth and laugh,” though we know full well that the “assassin is hungry.”

–Boris Dralyuk, Los Angeles Review of Books

Anthony Seidman has written a crucial sequence of unforgettable poems about the U.S-Mexican border.  We don’t get the entire picture off the news because our poetic visions about the borderlands reside in our best poets.  These are desert visions and they are human experiences that must be revealed to show how we all live in the same world.

–Ray Gonzalez

With language as his passport, Anthony Seidman traverses borders to chase mirages, make pacts, and craft fables. These poems demonstrate that citizenship in the world of letters requires a brutal honesty about the senseless inequalities and heartbreaking injustices and savage beauty and incomprehensible love of this world. Seidman is a citizen: he belongs to a republic with borders as open as the arms he spreads so wide in these poems. His gaze is wilder than a tattered dog’s, his tongue as fluid as a river and as sharp as a broken window pane.

–David Shook, author of Our Obsidian Tongues