Essential poetry of witness from the front lines of border militarization in Southern Arizona. These poetic dispatches bear witness to the fracturing of ecosystems and cultures due to border wall construction and extractive capitalism, while offering meditations on parenting, the resilience of interdependent cultures and ecosystems.
First Artspeak Press Edition, 2025. 6”x9”, 112 pages. 51 poems.
“These are poems of witness, essential soul testimony from the scenes of a paranoid society’s crimes. And they offer glimpses of how we stay human without looking away: cultivating wonder, raising children, fighting like hell for the beauty still woven all around and through us.” – Logan Phillips, from the introduction to Borderlings
Russ McSpadden is a writer and environmental organizer who works to protect the wildlife and wildlands of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. He has spent years monitoring and working in defense of northern jaguars, ocelots, rare insects and plants, and fragile transboundary ecosystems threatened by extractive industries and border militarization. He also stands alongside communities resisting new walls and mines. Borderlings is his debut collection.
“We Pay For Borders with Everything” Read an interview by The Border Chronicle with Russ here.
“One Way to Fight is to Amplify What You Love,” in Earth First! The Journal of Ecological Resistance, a reflection on publishing Borderlings by Logan Phillips
Essential poetry of witness from the front lines of border militarization in Southern Arizona. These poetic dispatches bear witness to the fracturing of ecosystems and cultures due to border wall construction and extractive capitalism, while offering meditations on parenting, the resilience of interdependent cultures and ecosystems.
First Artspeak Press Edition, 2025. 6”x9”, 112 pages. 51 poems.
“These are poems of witness, essential soul testimony from the scenes of a paranoid society’s crimes. And they offer glimpses of how we stay human without looking away: cultivating wonder, raising children, fighting like hell for the beauty still woven all around and through us.” – Logan Phillips, from the introduction to Borderlings
Russ McSpadden is a writer and environmental organizer who works to protect the wildlife and wildlands of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. He has spent years monitoring and working in defense of northern jaguars, ocelots, rare insects and plants, and fragile transboundary ecosystems threatened by extractive industries and border militarization. He also stands alongside communities resisting new walls and mines. Borderlings is his debut collection.
“We Pay For Borders with Everything” Read an interview by The Border Chronicle with Russ here.
“One Way to Fight is to Amplify What You Love,” in Earth First! The Journal of Ecological Resistance, a reflection on publishing Borderlings by Logan Phillips
From BORDERLINGS by Russ McSpadden
Borderlings Table of Contents
