My Perfect Cognate

Praise for My Perfect Cognate “Interrogates the connections and contrasts of her duality: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico, and more.”—Pamela Avil, USA Today ""New Must-Read Poetry"" “My Perfect Cognate is both tender and alarming, and it’s obviously a work of deep thought and passion. In our current political moment it’s almost required reading.”—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake Praise for Natalie Scenters-Zapico “Set on the border between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, a zone of lethal risk but vital potential. Other kinds of borders—between languages, immigration statuses, states of consciousness, genders, generations—accumulate around that arbitrary geographic line. . . . The Verging Cities is a frightening book, full of searchlights and shadows, but it’s also a book about the private pleasures—of sex, of music, of jokes and meals—that its tenderly drawn young lovers have while in states of anxious in-between-ness and fraught not-quiteness.”—New Yorker “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.”—Washington Post, Best Poetry Collections This Month (April 2019) “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.”—Indiana Review “You will not win a staring contest with Natalie Scenters-Zapico; this poet cannot, and will not, look away.”—American Microreviews and Interviews