The Yuha Desert is a point of desolation covering thousands of square miles. It is rock, sand, denuded mountains and hills, every inch scoured by rainlessness, a sun that leaves absolutely no room for error winter or summer, air and wind that pull at your fingernails during even the seemingly most harmless and limited exposures. It is one of the most fatal regions of the U.S. Mexico border, unfortunately notorious for the number of "migrants" found there, their bodies nearly mummified while attempting a journey north through this abyss. One can hardly imagine the forms of unrelenting desperation that would drive whole families to test this searing, mangling wilderness especially in the summer when temperatures can reach 130 degrees and higher, no shade for at least 6,000 years, and, the only certainty, no mercy for either the prepared or the unprepared.

     The countryside south is filled with plant species still in the process of being discovered, ancient cave paintings and one of the largest wildernesses in North America hovering against the equally isolate coast line of the Sea of Cortez. Up until forty years ago you could still spot jaguars in the marshes of the Colorado River Delta below the U.S. Line before that great river became the "vein" of the Northern Neighbor, tapped, drained, punctured, probed as if it were the last arm of a last junkie in a state of "junk collapse" from the hungers of the host. The two great cities on this Border, Mexicalli and Tijuana, were literally "born" in the Twentieth century, each metropolis now holding at least a million people, the indigenous languages of Mexico, the languages of Europe, Asia, and the shadow of the giant north of the border. These cities are bursting; disorderly, vulgar, unmanageable; massing, revelatory, fugitive, holding to themselves the excitements, contortions; fresh life-giving abandonments finding scale and articulation. Tijuana, the once despised, marginal sister of San Diego and Los Angeles has recently been named as one of a group of "creative locales" by Newsweek magazine, "on the rise in the new millennium," along with Kabul, Afghanistan, Austin, Texas, Zhongguancun, China, Marseilles, France, Cape Town, South Africa, Antwerp, Belgium, and Newcastle-Gateshead, England. Tijuana is a "city ... in the middle of an artistic flowering in which artists are re-examining the city's hybrid culture."

     Step one foot across the border into these streets and you are in another country, one that spills over into this whole Border Region with all of its troubles and wayward velocities. The one book I know of capable at this moment of accurately tracing the urgencies, impulses, and tragedies of this little known geography is the new anthology Across the Line/Al otro lado; the poetry of Baja California.Its editors, Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss, have constructed a collection which actually addresses those distinctions made by a poets' art which dares to breathe the ashes, contrivances, and rumors coming to life just beyond the crushing will of the Northern Neighbor. This collection is the only one I know that offers an initial grasp of a world animating itself in a new audacity ("The root of beauty" as Pasternak said, and the only thing which "draws us to each other".)

     There are 57 poets in this collection and both the Foreward and Introductionoffer excellent background. In addition to Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss, there are nine other contributing translators who have a life-long intimacy with the Spanish language, and the issues of the Border Region. All of the translators also know the streets, barrios, the often breathless press of these cities, the slang and vocabularies boiling up out of their noisy, often violent, spontaneous, compelling emergencies.

     The anthology begins aptly with the poetry of "native peoples": Cochimi, Cucapa, Kiliwa, Paipai, Kumiai. One of the Paipai poems carries the presence of a first fact as if the first breath cannot be forgotten, never buried in what will follow, having no mockery or immunity no matter where any scathing solitude might appear. For me, it sets the whole tone and risk of the book with its straight forward bravery, amusement, intoxication, and tender/fierce sadness:

     The first cry of the first cock: the first
whimper, the first.
                                             (repeat 4 times)

The first cock, the cock, the first cock cried, wept
the first crowing of the cock, the first cock sang, sang
the first crowing of the cock, the first the first
the first cry of the first cock: the first whimper,
the first
the first cry of the first cock: the first whimper,
the first
the first cock, the cock, the first cock cried, cried

the first cock cried,
the first, the first.

     Ruben Vizcaino Valencia is the initial poet in this collection. His Perdon por tener todavia mis ojos (Forgive Me for Not Being Blind)is an address to a city anchored at once to Whitman's Calamus,Lorca's Street and Dreams,but hovering now against the sterile, purer savageries of a 20th and now 21st century where on this border you can find your waiting mummification by just placing your heel over the line:

In this delirium
there's none of the border's inane cult of progress
nor the deluded pragmatism that conquered the moon.

The technology of exact computing doesn't reach here
no one speaks of c-notes in English
nor of Tourist mills
nor the hopeless ejidos of dreams

This sordid Tijuana of shadow and madness,
the wintery gasp disguised as a beggarwoman
abandoned on the outskirts with an unknown tatoo,
resplendent with outrage and orphanhood.

This my true impoverished home
and these my brothers and sisters,
ulcerated, snivelling, dying of gangrene
beneath the canopy of tourists lights.

In this foresakenness the blood of the third world flows
through hate-massacred courses among the veins.
Greed-crushed small minded city.

Forgive me my craft
my weaving of torture into words.
Forgive me for not being blind,
I am filled with this, it rots in my throat.

     The capacity for discovery, urgent development of a vocabulary, and an emotional reality welded to the history of a people and a place find an edgy precision in these lines, facts in the continuous moment of this poem calling the mind to awareness, conviction at the core of the art to attempt to make as much sense as possible out of the recordings heard and seen and brought to an integrity of feeling as living information. One is struck by the level of clarity, intensity, and the precise carriage of words "charged with involved matter" as the great poet Louis Zukofsky stated the central problem of "poetic conviction" and how the poet, if the art is to come alive, must find the mastery to express his or her beliefs as an emotional object. The poets in this volume have all pushed their experience and the body of their art to a confrontive authenticity, and how that authenticity must become exactingly awake bearing the consequences and fruitions such wakefulness will beckon. These are poets who have lived, certainly, but they have also studied and read. They are deeply conversant with the literary and visual arts, the politics and economics, the daily life of their cities, their hemisphere, and the larger world. They are also multilingual. Perhaps because they live in such a dangerous crossroads, the endless blocks of cruel reflectionas Francisco Morales states it, the necessity for a functioning, vibrant cosmopolitanism becomes central, an assemblage bearing absolute relation to what is found and given immediate presence as Edmundo Lizardi sings it in Baja Times:

The metropolis withdraws
Into one more night
Of long knives
And AK-47s

From blue to red
the sirens turn
Wailing and singing
From stars to sea...

     If you live on the border you won't be able to forget about the rivers, maybe deeper now than the Colorado, of crystal meth, heroine, cocaine, desperate hordes ennerving Lizardi's lines from February '94:

Heroes as great as the art of the word arrow
the word flower, the word oblivion
the word fire, the word death?

Who forgives and who is forgiven?

     The works are vulnerable, continuously succinct; they arrive at no consensus, to the editors' credit, and bring up every trouble possible to the life of the poem. Rosina Conde's Mary Kayhas no cosmetics and sentences any possible ornament to Fate and Truth as the issues of free potential are caught in their stark energies:

I
Mary Kay became a hippie in the sixties
went to India and I heard no more about her;
back then I was too stupid to become a hippie,
barely found out about Vietnam
or the Plaza de las Tres Culturas
in Tijuana it wasn't easy to learn about the Black Panther
or the Chicano Movement

II
My boyfriend was blackmailing me with his leukemia,
they gave him two years twenty years ago
and today I see him with his wife and five kids.
On the phone he would describe his funeral to hear me
cry, making me promise I'd always remember...

Al otro ladois full of news, enchantments, devourings, recordings of existence without evasions, spells and bells calling to appearances, and what the great Mary Butts said in her Taverner Novels about "taste":

"Where taste begins all possibility of an ethos ends"

but what does "begin" is marked by Gabriel Trujillo Munoz in his poem TJ:

The world begins here
Any world you can imagine
or conjure up
Out of cardboard boxes
And sheets of tin corroding with time

City of plastic and wire
Metropolis fertilized by the sun
That the rain dissolves or turns to stone..."

     I don't know of another anthology that contains such truth about this Border World at the beginning of the 21st Century...such poets, every one of them...have the capacity to actually stand inside the consequences of what they see and hear.