Hivestruck

Praise

Advance praise for Hivestruck:

“Vincent Toro’s virtuosic new collection Hivestruck shows how one of our most talented and daring poets engages with our socially mediated world, on screen and off, decoding and recoding to create an original aesthetic in the process. Crackling with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit, and utilizing an array of innovative forms and language, Hivestruck is poetry from the present and future worthy of the best buzz, ‘provid[ing]…specs to build new / possibilities.’” —John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New & Selected Poems
 
“’The human,’ writes Vincent Toro in Hivestruck, ‘wants nothing more than to be anything BUT human.’ And how the human becomes un-human is at the heart of this rip-roaring, cosmic art project that lives in the stars, in the sea, in fractals and conceptual forms that will blast out of our devices to transform our devivified brains. In these pages the multilingual, decolonial cyborg space claws its way through empire like an orchestra of ‘inimitable energy.’ This is the cyber poetry of the hungry, mutating body.” —Daniel Borzutsky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human
 
“Vincent Toro’s new work is a sweeping, and weeping, book of change, technology, old wounds, past forms and fresh approaches. Hivestruck is a sensitive and deeply considered work that plays with expectations of organization, skill, and meaning. It understands how we can be supersaturated in our senses and yet feel alone, tendrils reaching toward someone, something without disappearing, being swallowed whole. In reading this book we see ourselves, even in our hidden, quiet desperation. It’s where the hope is, when we learn we are not actually by ourselves. The community of us revealing our needs, is the truth. We are actually all together in all this as we can see in Vincent’s bold poetic vision.” —Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems and Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry