Lima :: Limón
Winner of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
BuzzFeed's Books Coming in 2019 That You'll Want To Keep On Your Radar
NPR's 2019 Poetry Preview
NBC's 8 Excellent Latino Poetry Books for National Poetry Month
The Rumpus's Books To Read in 2019
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“Scenters-Zapico speaks fearlessly throughout this, her second book. In doing so, she illustrates what needs to change so that victims can be freed from the cycle of abuse..”
“With unabashed passion, the poet returns to subjects introduced in her first book, The Verging Cities (2015), further complicating binary notions of language, geography, and gender. In gleaming, evocative verse that combines Spanish and English, the poet interrogates her homelands.”
“Lima :: Limón is rangier, freer to dip in and out of dreams, to try on voices, histories, and roles. Many of the book’s most beautiful poems shuttle easily between English and Spanish.”
“... contains all the sharpness of something acidic—the pain and the brilliance, the pleasure, the stinging accuracy.”
“Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires.”
“With an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region. However, she does so while acknowledging the generations of women who have sewn together traditions of resistance and resilience in the face of misogyny and machsimo.
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“Through a range of forms—tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more—the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection (after The Verging Cities) incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference.”
The Verging Cities
Winner of the PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award in Poetry
Winner of the GLCA's 2016 New Writers Award
Winner of the 2016 Utah Book Award
Winner of the 2016 NACCS Book Award
Featured as One of The Best Debuts of 2015 by Poets and Writers
Named one of 23 Essential New Books By Latino Poets by Los Angeles Times
Named a Top 30 Must-Read Poetry Debut by LitHub
“[I]t is difficult to find a voice discerning and trustworthy enough to share its stories with the scope and passion [with which] Natalie Scenters-Zapico faces the subject in The Verging Cities. . . . The Verging Cities doesn’t rely on the sentimentalism of liberal immigrant narratives or commercials designed to garner donations; it doesn’t feel like a movie. Reading the book doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me weep with anger and frustration. It opens the wounds people try to ignore. It calls the ambulance.”
“The U.S.-Mexico border and the strained but wondrous connection between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez is the energetic and sometimes tragic setting of Scenters-Zapico’s debut collection of poems. Hers is an insider’s view behind the headlines: the troubled border is also a place teeming with life, thriving with culture and hope. This book is a hard-won love song to one of America’s most misunderstood landscapes.”
“Scenters-Zapico recognizes...that text is an inadequate form of resurrection. Yet she must try. ‘Some say, you have no right to talk about the dead. / So I talk of them as living, their bodies standing in the street’s bend,’ she writes. The poet’s words, like flint and tinder, ignite the silence.”