New England Review

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Writer’s Notebook—Surrender Your Biometrics Here

[Natalie Scenters-Zapico, photo by John Markadakis]

Before the pandemic, I made one of many trips from LAX to MEX with my husband. I have family in Long Beach, so it’s easy to catch a flight to Mexico City after visiting them. On my way home from one of these trips, I was struck by how fierce border protection through airline travel had become.

As many of us have experienced, agents blare over loudspeakers not to use our phones, they corral us into tinier and tinier buses, then to large cordoned off rooms filled with machines to process our documents and take our photos, until finally we wait for a receipt of judgement that tells us if we can go through the glass gates or if we must stop and speak with an agent. I am always anxious during these encounters, but usually because I am traveling with someone who is seen as “suspicious” by the state. My whole life my loved ones have been seen as a threat to the state in some capacity, and I have always been placed in the room just outside to wait and see if Homeland Security will leave me stranded in this country without anyone I love in it. It’s a peculiar and common position many are put in. On the one hand, it is a position of the privileged to have citizenship, on the other hand it puts one a stone’s throw from having everything that gives your life meaning in a country (mothers, fathers, siblings, partners) taken from you. 

My husband started the paperwork to become a citizen the week Trump was elected to office. I wish I could say it was because he wanted this, but the truth is more like I was terrified of losing him. When he finally went to a courthouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, to swear allegiance to the country that actively wanted him deported for over a decade, let’s just say it was emotional. Courthouse employees handed out tiny American flags to each new citizen. His class of applicants, if you will, was the first to be welcomed to the country by a DVD of Donald J. Trump. I wish I could tell you I remember what Trump said in that video, but I do not. I only remember being terrified that something could go wrong at any moment. When you grow up dictated by agents from Homeland Security and CBP you know all too well that what they say is “routine” can quickly turn into a routine to destroy your life. As my husband raised his right hand to say the oath, he looked so far away. The whole process felt terribly painful to me. But what was my pain compared to his? After the ceremony we both left the courthouse directly to teach at the university a few blocks away. No time off for a US citizen. 

Perhaps this is why on a return flight from MEX to LAX I was in shock when I was told that I had to go speak with an agent, and my husband would be the one waiting for me on the other side of the immigration barrier. It was a complete reversal of roles. Though I am a citizen of this country from birth, I was nervous. What could they possibly want from me? As my poem “Present this receipt to CBP” details, it was to present me with a sales-pitch for Global Entry, in which I surrender my biometric information so that I can further use the privilege of my citizenship to stand apart from my family. When I see people speed by me at the airport because they have biometric visas like Global Entry or CLEAR, I can’t help but see the cosmopolitan elite using its giant shoe to step on those who don’t have such privileges. In that moment though, nodding and smiling through the agent’s pitch, I realized that I was being asked to make a choice: Be a part of the cosmopolitan elite or stand harassed like the rest of the crowd. 

I have yet to apply for Global Entry. Truthfully, I refuse to do so. I’ll wait in line with the masses. I’m no foreigner to waiting in lines having grown up crossing the US-Mexico border from El Paso to Juárez and back frequently. We are in an era that asks us to document and surrender every part of ourselves. Perhaps a small act of radical rebellion can be to say: No. 

Natalie Scenters-Zapico‘s poems “Present This Receipt to CBP” and “Agent” appeared in NER 42.3. She is the author of Lima: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015). Scenters-Zapico has won Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Florida.

Introducing NER 42.3

Octopus, swan, agent, vortex, tunnel, metronome, Berlin…

Cover of NER 42.3

Welcome to the fall issue of NER, and welcome, poetry editor Jennifer Chang! For her first issue on the masthead, Jennifer has gathered 14 poets into our pages, most of them appearing in NER for the first time. They are an accomplished group with wide-ranging aesthetics and perspectives, and include a recent Yale Series of Younger Poets winner, multiple NEA fellows, Lannan and CantoMundo Fellows, former Bread Loafers, and more. See the full list and sample works by visiting the table of contents.

The issue also features a novella by Alice Greenway that takes place in a refugee camp in Samos, and a short story by Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani (translated by Alice Guthrie) told from the other side of the Aegean, as one refugee faces his dread of crossing the sea. Scott Blackwood tells a story of American soldiers moving up the Tigris River through Mosul, while Blair Hurley brings us into the arcane world of medieval scholarly annotations. Gregory Spatz dives into the longings of a musician separated from his muse, and Nicole Cuffy takes readers on a father–daughter drive to Montauk.

Essayists in this issue include National Book Award finalist Jenn Shapland; May-lee Chai, whose previous essay in NER was selected as a notable in Best American Essays 2021; journalist and inveterate traveler Leath Tonino on the writer Charles Bowden; and NER newcomer Julie Riddle. Set designer and artist Ademola Olugebefola details his decades of experience with the Black Arts Movement and Weusi Artist Collective in an interview with Nathaniel G. Nesmith, and Polish writer Marek Zaganczyk takes us to Berlin through art and literature, in a meditative essay translated by Jakob Ziguras. Venturing into the absurd are four theater monologues by John Cotter and a little-known tale by The Brothers Grimm.

Get a copy of the current issue today in print or ebook, or—better yet—subscribe and support NER all year long!

[Readers of the front page of our website may note that we have not updated the homepage selections to reflect the current issue. Technical difficulties prevent us from updating them immediately, but we will do so as soon as it’s possible without breaking the website completely. Thanks for your patience.]

Fall 2021: October Poetry Feature

New Books from NER Authors

The leaves outside are turning and gravity is covering our sidewalks in chestnuts and apples (Sir Isaac Newton would be smiling). With cooler weather on its way, we recommend grabbing a cup of tea and enjoying a title or two from these New England Review authors and translators.

Poet Jeffrey Franklin releases his second collection, Where We Lay Down (Kelsay Books). A “multifarious and expansive collection,” the book is split thematically into six explorations: Fathers and Sons, Making Love, Making War, Homing, Totem Animals, and Full Emptiness. Influenced by Franklin’s own interests in religion and spirituality, Where We Lay Down delves into human conditions around maturation and reflection. Franklin’s poem, “To a Student Who Reads ‘The Second Coming’ As Sexual Autobiography,” appeared in NER 22.3.

Machete (Knopf), the third collection from poet Tomás Q Morín, is released this month. Described as a “lyrical, dynamic, insightful collection, at once delicate and fierce, touching on climate, family, racism, growth, and life itself,” Machete explores suffering and its intersections with reactions of both anger and laughter. Morín’s poems have previously appeared in NER 35.3, NER 33.2, and NER 32.2; his piece “A Renaissance Mule” was published as an NER Digital in 2012. 

Jane Wong publishes her sophomore collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything (Alice James Books). Composed around central themes of migration and loss, grief and alienation, How to Not Be Afraid of Anything grapples with immigrant identities as made relational to histories past and present. Wong’s poem “I Haul a House Out of the Bay” was published in NER 39.4. 

My Wilderness: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press) is the latest collection from poet Maxine Scates. Traversing the emotional landscapes of motherhood and memory through explorations of loss and empathy, My Wilderness “is a grave and beautiful archive of losses.” The book’s title poem, “My Wilderness,” appeared in NER 37.2. 

Poet and writer Victoria Chang publishes Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief with Milkweed Editions. Despite not being labelled explicitly as a poetry collection, Dear Memory encapsulates the “process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry,” as Chang explores themes of immigrant identity, history, grief, and knowledge of the self through family relics and letters. Chang’s poetry has appeared in numerous issues since 2002, most recently NER 41.3 and NER 38.3. 

Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays (Astra House) is released in English through collaboration with poet and NER translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Thematically organized around love and writing, on mortality, the natural world, and nostalgia, the collection’s poems and essays are “in conversation with each other,” as Yu utilizes the written form to grapple with family, home, and “the reality of disability in the context of a body’s urges and desires.” Sze-Lorrain’s translations have appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 36.2.

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Two New Episodes of NER Out Loud

Michael McGriff and Jesse Lee Kercheval

Listen to two new episodes of NER Out Loud, hosted and produced by our summer interns Yardena Carmi ’23 and Rebecca Amen ’22.

Episode 16: Michael McGriff reads an excerpt from his poem “Questions for the Interrogation,” followed by an interview with Yardena Carmi. Their conversation explores the poem’s tribute to rural Oregon and Pablo Neruda, the limitations of memory and language, and Michael’s work as a translator of Tomas Tranströmer.

“From Questions for the Interrogation” was originally published in NER 42.1 (spring 2021).

Episode 17: Jesse Lee Kercheval reads her essay “Crash,” followed by a conversation with Rebecca Amen. The short essay interrogates the author’s memory of a shocking car accident that took place more than 50 years ago. In the interview, Kercheval further explores the nature of memory, essay writing in general, and her work as a translator of Uruguayan poetry.

“Crash” was originally published in NER 42.2 (summer 2021).

Visit NER’s podcast page here. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or listen on Soundcloud.

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