Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Latino/Latina Studies. 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 nonfiction. 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. Ed O'Casey's PROXIMIDAD is a gorgeous, harrowing memoir of identity and place.... 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