Reviewed by Laurel Kallen
Indifferent Cities
by Ángel García
Tupelo Press
135 pages, Print: $19.95, Dec 2025
In Indifferent Cities, Ángel García painstakingly traverses time and terrain in search of lost ancestors and their elusive truths – truths essential to García’s own identity and, by extension, to the identities of readers who seek a deeper understanding of their roots. García previously published the collection Teeth Never Sleep, which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award and which explores the split consciousness demanded of men in a culture of dominance.
In Indifferent Cities, which draws its title from the theme of an indifferent dominant culture in the work of St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, García, armed with a few documents, including post cards from a wandering great-grandfather and a grandmother’s journal, along with actual searches in Mexico for old addresses and graves, struggles to reconstruct the lives of his ancestors. There is much that cannot be reconstructed, however, which is why the poems in Indifferent Cities so often contain bracketed space, grayed-out text, missing words, and strike-throughs. Text also meanders or hops across (and sometimes practically falls off) the page, techniques that add to the viscera of the poems.
As García is the son of Mexican immigrants, it is fitting that the first poem, “Cenotes,” and the last poem, “Hogar,” speak to us entirely in Spanish while the poems in-between speak in English, albeit an English warmly flavored with Spanish words and phrases. In “Cenotes” (water-filled caverns), we meet a family converted into strangers (“una familia / convertido / en extraños”) while in “Hogar” (home), the poet’s Spanish language bubbles up, overfilled with light (“mi lenguaje burbujas sobrellenadas de luz”), as happy an ending as possible given the inevitable lack of resolution to the poet’s expedition. The bookending we see in “Cenotes” and “Hogar” serves to tether the poet’s otherwise far-flung quest. It occurs again with the poem “Inhalar,” which appears early in the book and its inverse “Exhalar,” one of the closing poems – the two functioning as inverted mirrors of one another:
Inhale: one last time the home you’ll never know again (6)
The poem then continues in this format, suggesting a long period of breath-holding during the emotional intensity of the poet’s search.
This line is then mirrored in “Exhalar”:
Exhale: ya lo pasado, pasado no me interesa (the past is the past, I’m not interested) (129)
Although these words might be attributed to the poet’s mother, he borrows them for himself at a plateau in what has been a steep and arduous climb through the past. Also worth noting here is that Inhalar (except for the title) is written in English, while Exhalar begins in Spanish and switches to English halfway through, signaling, if not an end to the journey, then at least a stopping point, a place to catch one’s breath (to exhale) before continuing on.
The idea of checking one’s breathing is reinforced by “Contenga la respiración” (71), which appears halfway through the book and in which each line begins with an italicized hold your breath, as in
hold your breath your parents
will dieare dead
This line includes a strikethrough, which, along with other innovations, the poet skillfully employs to emphasize the uncertain nature of his exploration and the resistant, sometimes opaque, nature of the family history.
Another type of inversion that García employs to lush effect occurs in Part Four (the book is comprised of six parts), where the titles of many of the poems appear at the bottom of the page instead of at the top. These bottom-of-the-page titles serve to evoke pictographic moments in the immigrant family’s experience, such as a photo of the poet’s grandmother at age 13 standing on the beach with two friends, still too young to know certain types of fear: “Holding / tightly the hands of her girlfriends—all of them years / from becoming women—they cannot not yet fathom / the reasons why they should fear men.” “Thirteen Years Old (1934)” (76). As a piercing follow-up three pages later, another bottom-of-the-page titled poem “Telegram (Oct. 1942)” (79) reads, He hit me. I had the baby in my arms / and couldn’t defend myself.”
The family’s travels from Mexico to the United States and from state to state in search of a home and a livelihood are often met with disappointment. In “3-day Road Trip (1956)” (88), the poet evokes the difficulties encountered by his father, then only 15, when he drives his mother and siblings in a standard-shift car from Brownsville, Texas to Chicago, Illinois, encountering car trouble, racism, and an unwelcoming brother.
Because they are hungry, his mother tells him to pull over at a diner. No n*ggers,
No Mexicans, a sign reads in the window. Some hunger needs no translation. (88)
. . . When they arrive to his brother’s apartment, his brother slams the door in their faces.
They are not welcome here. While his siblings sleep, his mother decides to go back. (88)
The right justification in this poem serves to emphasize and echo the repeated door-slammings experienced by the family – with each couplet crashing into the page margin.
Along with his discovery of the harshness encountered in “3-day Road Trip,” the poet faces the challenges of his own research endeavor. In “Those Flowers,” bulleted research questions rendered in italics precede a series of somewhat confused musings rendered as shallow downward steps across the page. (97)
- What sources can you trust?
I hunch over the good light:
squint & distance documents
:days: months: years: decipher
As the book progresses, it becomes clear that the poet is grappling with his past as a son and grandson partly as a means of better navigating his own fatherhood. In the poem, “Nene” (116) the reader finds a compelling transmogrification of son into father and back into son. It is unclear which is which.
But I am the kind of man who’s abandoned his father.
How easy, my tongue. Not me. Never. No. I tell myself
I am not the kind of man who’d abandon his child.
* * *
What I know about fatherhood
is tidal, it comes and goes. What I know about fatherhood
does not yet ache. While we play peek-a-boo he gaggles.
* * *
Because
he looks like me, I must look after him. So helpless, so young.
I convince myself: every baby needs a father. I swaddle
my father like a baby. No. I cuddle a baby who is my father. (116)
This poem — and the entirety of 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.
About the reviewer: Biography. Laurel Kallen is a poet and fiction writer who teaches creative writing at Lehman College (CUNY). She was born in Newark, New Jersey, and later lived in San Francisco and Berkeley before returning to the East Coast and settling in New York City.