“The bracing latest from Tamez (after Raven Eye) movingly explores the genocide of Indigenous American peoples, weaving it into the story of Tamez’s father’s death, as well as the death of her father’s mother when he was a child. Formally, the poems appear in discrete sections, punctuated by vertical lines, as in the book’s title. Tamez likens this effect to the penitentiary posts she counts in the book’s opening poems. ‘When I was a girl/ the river wasn’t a border,’ she writes, and the poems enact this push and pull between memory, possibility, and ongoing violence in the “liquid flow” of circular time. While the book is prompted by a cassette recording of Tamez’s father speaking, the most complex and lyrical moments emerge when she traces a feminist arc through her family and cultural history: ‘I am a polity, the lawmaker, my grandmothers are/ the roots of fecund rose and swan lady of the lake.‘ Many of these pages are filled with Tamez’s reflections on, and advocacy for, traditions that have survived despite colonialism’s most malicious efforts at control: ‘Live softly on earth./ Have a good system to live softly on earth,’ she advises. This is a necessary, urgent, and affecting work.”

“Margo Tamez’s poems are a witness to legacies of colonial violence and family resilience. They unpack how “Ideas are like holsters for guns” or “When fear imprisons the father the whole family internalizes prison through him.” They protest. They name names. They demand to be heard and they imply action. You’ll find yourself positioned in relation to Tamez’s poetry–who am I in the face of these statements? where do I place on this map of justice? where would I like to stand in relation to this witness? Father Genocide is a bold book, holding every one of us accountable for a world order we maintain. We have learned well in recent decades just how personal the political can be. Brought together in this collection, Tamez’ poems make that truth a reckoning.”

“What Tamez’s Father Genocide offers us is an insight into paternal remembrance & identity. The dissection of identity & blending Apache language repurposes the historical memory or benchmarks the archival burden of breaking down barriers, walls, & fences. Tamez’s use of vertical lines establishes a hybrid form of space & place. The bending of phrase creates a cyclic motion taking us back to Survivance & reconciliation, a fracture restoration of memory.”

“What it is not is a simplistic black-and-white collection of political poetry. There are not only no simple answers here, there are no simple poems. And Tamez is capable of filling almost any page with some tremendous moments of writing even when what is being depicted is itself utterly horrific. It’s an exceptionally complex project & Tamez shows herself to be completely up to the task. Indeed, what first made me pull this book out of the mass of volumes submitted for the William Carlos Williams award was just such wonderful ‘excess’ right on the very first page. You can’t write like that and make it work without total confidence in your skills, and utter fearlessness as well. Tamez makes the reader, this reader, feel completely comfortable with both the specificity of her vision – the smelted sky is a direct antecedent of the river clogged with invasive species & toxic sludge some 22 pages later – and the surges of emotion that are part & parcel of this text.”

“Although she acknowledges strong literary roots in the mythology and storytelling traditions of her culture, Tamez fights against the assumption that these fairy tales are all they have to offer, and encourages work that flows from cultural and social issues and are firmly based in reality. She has published several volumes of such poetry, including the chapbook Alleys and Allies, Naked Wanting, and Raven Eye.”

“In her book Naked Writing Tamez explores the effects of the militarization of the border: After serving for many years as a nurse at the Veteran’s Affairs Hospital in San Antonio, Tamez’s mother returns to Calaboz, the home where her Lipan ancestors once resided and what is now Texas and Tamaulipas.

While jogging along the river on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, she is perceived as la migra (the derogatory term used by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol who stop migrants from slipping into the U.S.): “They think she runs away from them, / that she is an illegal, / trespassing from Mexico” (Naked Writing 61). She stops, turns around, and in loud Spanish (although she speaks perfect English), challenges the validity and legality of the border.

The question she poses are powerful: “how exactly do they know / if she came from here, or there ... I am an indigenous woman, / born in El Calaboz, you understand?” (61). In writing about this event, Tamez illustrates how the militarization of the region creates a place where so-called “Natives” clash with “illegal aliens.”

Her mother’s proud statement challenges the categorization of the Tamaulipas Lipan-Apache as “aliens,” and her words raise questions about what it means to be “Native,” “Indigenous,” or “Indian.” If the U.S. government does not recognize the Lipan and Jumano as sovereign Indian nations, how can they be “Native”? Or even “Indian”?

When Tamez’s mother claims her indigeneity, she invokes the history of the Lipan people, who once moved freely throughout the region. She challenges the most evident manifestation of the nation state—the border—and the way the Border Patrol supports and maintains multinational maquiladora factories, the extraction of wealth from migrant workers and the militarization of the region. She takes a stand against the ways the border negatively impacts the daily lives of indigenous people.”