"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.
