Exposition Park

Published 2010

In this collection of poems, a diorama of transhistorical artifacts offers new life to voluptuous lyric forms. These poems are inspired by disparate mediums and events that span the world fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transatlantic passage from New Spain to the Americas, collaborative entanglements with art and performance, as well as the poet’s trademark figures of intimacy. This collection rushes forth in playful syntax. Ornate sounds pulse and waver between opaque intellectualizations of industry, along with corporeal hauntings that resonate from the past.

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Tejada’s work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications… The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose…

—Alan Gilbert in Another Future: Poetry and Modern Art in a Postmodern Twilight

Crisscrossing languages, geographical borders (the Mexican-United States border is only one of several), and cultural taboos, Exposition Park, is, in the most literal sense, a transgressive text, one of those books that rewards reading after reading.

—Tyrone Williams, Jacket 2

Tejada’s poetic imaginary is composed with dense historic artifacts that are overlaid on present conflicts, suggesting that trauma is absorbed into cultural movement. But he refuses progressive democracy, performing in his writing instead the ways in which destructive acts reverberate into the present through violent systemic enforcements of social bodies. Tejada untethers the progressive ease of cause-and-effect expectations to burden thought with a dense overlap of perspectives.

—Dale Smith, Toward. Some. Air: Remarks on Poetics

retrododernism