Indifferent Cities

Tupelo Press, 2025

Winner, Helena Whitehill Book Award

Through one state to another, from one country to the next Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations. Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, the collection wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author’s inevitable return to determine where and to whom he belongs.

“Indifferent Cities traces a relentless search—for names, for language itself. Ángel García’s lyrics reveal a myriad of forms, shadow, story, reflection, reverberation, negation, missive, reversal. If reading is a migration of thought across a page, these poems confound and renew our sense of direction. Podemos decir poema-como-brújula, brújula-como-elegía, elegía-como-composición-de-ausencias, which for García, consist of the endless shapes of a family’s love translated across time and terrain, lenguaje y linaje, silence and song. ”

Patrick Rosal, author of The Last Thing:

New and Selected Poems

Reviews

Action, Spectacle

Tara Ballard

"Throughout the collection, García deftly weds together form and content, in that the stanzaic structures themselves inform the subject matter depicted upon the page."

Compulsive Reader

Laurel Kallan

Indifferent Cities – raises compelling questions about the nature of family, of generations, of how we may reach a point in our lives when, regardless of whether our parents are living or deceased, we become, psychically, parents to our own parents and perhaps also children to our own children. Indifferent Cities, in inspiring the reader to consider these paradoxes, is anything but indifferent. On the contrary, it is poignant.

ÁNGEL GARCÍA