THE BORDER SIMULATOR

In Gabriel Dozal's debut bilingual collection of poems, the U.S/Mexican border is redefined as a place of ever changing narrative, and crossing it becomes a type of simulation. The author inventively frames the migrant experience as a techno-experience, a sort of game.

THE BORDER SIMULATOR, is a thrilling story of a brother, Primitivo and his sister, Primitiva, who live in alternate worlds. As Primitivo attempts to cross the border he learns of the various, often dangerous, boundaries he must get through and endure. His narrative, like the others crossers begins to change, in attempt to clear the simulation. His sister Primitiva, across the border, lives in a harsh alternate reality of an exploited migrant worker in la fabrica. Jaded and overworked, she becomes part of the vicious work cycle, left without an identity and no way out of the simulation. Both realized the only way to survive is to become the best versions of their new narratives.

Throughout the collection, Dozal's language weaves themes of technology, simulated realities, migration, capitalism, surveillance, and cryptocurrency, conveying Primitivo and Primitiva's challenges. Using inventive imagery, lively wordplay, these energetic poems oscillate between the harrowing and the joyful, interrogating, innovating, leaving the reader with new perspectives - and that's the whole point isn't it?

This is published as a bilingual book, English and Spanish side by side in a gorgeous trade paperback original edition.

Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, Texas, an area that is the source of much of the oppression faced by crossers in the US. Throughout this poetry collection Dozal situates the reader within the borderlands - from desert to detainment centers. The author received his MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, Guernica, Bomb Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, The Volta, Contra Viento, and more.