“[A] standout first collection . . . Torres steps into the sphere of such clarion American poets as Luis Rodriguez, Raúl Salinas, Juan Felipe Herrea, and Carlos Cumpián. His is a welcome voice in the chorus telling the essential story of the Latinx experience of home.”
—Booklist
“A study of crossing cultures written with affecting urgency.”
—Library Journal
“Many of these poems are remarkable for their dramatic tension, even as they reflect on ambitious questions of language, privilege, and power. . . .In this accomplished volume, language can be the ‘thick glass between us,’ impeding connection and understanding, but Torres’s writing offers a vision that is startling and far-reaching.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In his magnificent enumerations; his allegiances; his ordeals of self, figure, and desire, Michael Torres gives us an uncharted and ‘incomplete,’ ever-flaming matrix of being and becoming a brown man, a person in an unknown America. Incredible, truth-fisted, shattering, groundbreaking.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Imagine
“This spectacular collection of acutely conscious poems awakens readers to our universal need to belong. . . . He speaks to the constant naming and renaming of the self and others at the intersection of multiple identities and perceptions through an arresting voice that is provocative yet vulnerable, urban yet serene, mournful yet buoyant.”
—Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country
“With poems that drop like beads of acid on paper, sizzling away first impressions and assumptions, revealing in their burning wake the underlayer of truth, and how it, after years, still smarts and bleeds and blossoms in us. I love this book more than I have any other book in a long time . . . celebrating our duality, the multitudinous breadth and depth of our varied and bounteous humanity.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand
“Absence doesn’t simply haunt Michael Torres’s poems: it blazes through them. . . . Torres is an exhilarating writer, a virtuoso who lets us hear what language can erase and create—while making it sing.”
—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine
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