The Border Simulator

How does a line in the sand become a border—a fictional boundary with material heft and harmful consequences? Who runs borders, and who runs across them? Which crossings are quotidian; which are cruxes upon which our lives turn? These questions are hardwired into the titular conceit of Gabriel Dozal’s debut, The Border Simulator. What is the border simulator, exactly? The book’s 200-odd pages of Spanish-inflected English and English-speckled Spanish stay captivatingly vague. It’s a geopolitical role-playing game. No, it’s a digital dystopia in “an 8-bit desert.” No, worse—a surveillance system with creepy sensitivities: “The border simulator knows your smell so well.”

Dozal’s shapeshifting conceit frees him from documentary realism and journalistic euphemism, those all-too-familiar modes of writing about the US–Mexico border. It’s an unexpected short-cut to technological topics rarely broached in poetry: TikTok, cryptocurrency, data marketplaces. It lets him toy with genre mash-ups, world-building, and characters like Primitivo, a border-crosser; Primitiva, a migrant worker; and Customs, a glossily corporate chorus. Dozal’s a riffer, a one-upping accumulator, aiming brazenly for “A continual reply-all effect.” He can also hopscotch between end-stopped aphorisms, complete in themselves, volatile in combination.

The Border Simulator? More like border see you later.

Were you pure of heart when you wrote this thing, or what?

Dozal appreciates what’s lost—or gained—in crossing borders: “how else would Primitivo get here, / except through poor translation?” That includes the linguistic border lying down the book’s spine. The Border Simulator is a facing-page bilingual edition, pairing English poems with Spanish translations by Natasha Tiniacos, who gamely rises to Dozal’s ludic level. (In place of the soundalikes Simulator and see you later, she finds frontera, border, and fín de una era, end of an era.) For lines, stanzas, pages at a time, Dozal’s English and Tiniacos’s Spanish slip out of sync, each moving at its own pace. Nothing in language is universal, context-independent—nothing, Dozal realizes, except that ubiquitous marking, $, which means the same thing the world over:

        He needed the money
The simulator didn’t notice
it was already happening

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