Miguel Murphy: Javier, I think actually YOU are the "invisible man sleeping on a bench" in the H of your name, and this makes our books in an important way related, opposed even, not as boxers in a ring, but as elements, not air and sand but, say, breath and blood, both of the body, but ruled by their different substance. As you say in the Advertisement to your first book, Some Clarifications and Other Poems, you wanted to see if the poet could be "removed from the center of the creative act" and this made me intensely aware that my own work is unable to do so, unable to free themselves from my own psychological dilemmas, which of course live not in the brain, but in the veins. . . But what of living as "Javier," to be "of the air," to be of some space between two languages—except you're not between! Your work exists—"has air"—in more than one place of language at once, musically mistaken, correctly broken, spoken into bodies diverse as lips and veils, old toys asking to be loved again, or undocumented migrant workers swallowed by the earth after a hurricane. The "self" of your work travels, flies, and has to clarify: to elucidate, to make plain, purify, clean up what it sees in the world, has to name the names of its names. In some ways your book is interested in meaning itself, and the many beautiful ways that language fails it.

So do you feel like you are more yourself in Spanish or in English, or does the syllable itself free you of this kind of country? Do you believe in borders, or is your work in some way an antidote to the new fence Bush has put up between Mexico and the US?

Javier Huerta: Actually I am the man in the lonely library who looks into your eyes and refuses to speak. For that I apologize. But let me not remain quiet now. My work is meant only as an antidote to boredom, to the boredom of borders. (Frost has already written the antidote to all fences.) No one is free of this kind of country. We all become part of a nation at birth. Nacimiento/Nacionalidad. We know each other only as citizens. Our bodies disappear. Then there is your poetry. How it dares to show the body, vulnerable and beautiful. "Lost body of affections." You go where I cannot because you dare to translate your "self," the blood in your veins. But here I question: circulatory or digestive? The strangers who inhabit your poems know there is no distinction between hunger and gluttony. The gesture is the same: a gaping mouth.

Is the inside of a mouth your favorite part of the body? Confession—I hide behind language. The text, my robe. That is how our books are opposed. Is cannibalism the only way to recover our bare bodies? Do you believe in stars, or is your work in some way an antidote to the new mission to settle Mars?

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