Proximidad: A Mexican/American Memoir - by Ed O'Casey

Publication Date: April 1, 2017
Paperback, 92 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-33-5

Appropriate for an account of life, and death, on the border between two countries, two worlds, two realities, by an author who has roots in both, this book bridges genres, of verse and memoir and journalism and creative non-fiction. As poetry of documentary witness it is a corrosive account (a word carefully chosen, for indeed there are bodies dissolved in acid in these pages), a harrowing but necessary confrontation with the horrific results of America's drug wars and trade pacts. Nominally set in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, it more truthfully occupies a hellscape straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, and for all its terror it is just as marvelous a creation.

Praise for Ed O'Casey and Proximidad:

"Ed O'Casey gets close. Closer. Closest. His poems crawl up from Juarez streets, nestle in his bed, in his child's nursery, in his mind and heart and soul. And then he writes them to us, to all of us who learn what we do not want to know about this border that lives inside us, no matter the walls and fences we build to keep it distant."

—Molly Molloy, Border and Latin America Specialist at New Mexico State University

"Ed O'Casey’s Proximidad is a gorgeous, harrowing memoir of identity and place. Returning to his childhood homeland of El Paso, Texas, to live in his father’s house with his wife and newborn daughter, makes O'Casey inhabit the liminal chaos of the drug war-ravaged border between Mexico and the United States—a line demarcated by a trickle of water and a bridge—nearly nothing at all. Proximidad traverses the nostalgia of his Mexican-American youth and the palpable fear of the death-steeped present. Even El Paso—the second safest city in America—has air thickly tinged with death and haunted by the hundreds of women missing from the maquiladoras on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande or the nameless, fingerless and faceless bodies that appear in Juarez each morning. Proximidad effortlessly delves into the horrific beauty of Juarez and El Paso with muscular lyricism, mining experimental constellations of poems and personal prose from a bedrock of hewn and collaged advertisements, news, and magazine articles. O'Casey shows us how fragile and dread-edged even the
fiercest of our loves can be. This is a wondrous first book."

—Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir

"In Ed O'Casey’s timely book, Proximidad, the author, of mixed heritage working in mixed genres, offers us a memoir of unparalleled honesty, humility, and commitment to art’s twin ideals—testament and responsibility—the pursuit of which is endless, especially given the elusiveness of his subject, the borderlands as a cultural, psychological, and political space. In the process, a land between cultures embodies its own culture defined, if ever, by proximity, reducible to neither side of the boundary. To find one’s place on the border is, in some profound sense, to lose one’s way, to go outward painfully, factually, unflinchingly, because one’s true home is always here and elsewhere, embedded in debt and gratitude, in the contingent nature of identity and our great unyielding hunger for a larger story. A terrific book."

—Bruce Bond, author of The Other Sky and For the Lost Cathedral

Ed O’Casey earned an MA at the University of North Texas and an MFA at New Mexico State University. His poems have appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review, Cold Mountain VIEW, Euphony, Poetry Quarterly, Whiskey Island, NANO Fiction, and West Trade Review. He lives in San
Antonio.