An incomplete list of names Poems

Review by Booklist Review

In his standout first collection Torres, a recipient of NEA and Bread Loaf fellowships, establishes a strong new presence on the American literary landscape. In "The Pachuco's Grandson Considers Skipping School," a poem that glows and hovers above the confusions of youth, he writes, "We were more mustache than / our mothers could manage." and ends, "I placed a silver chain around my neck / and it fit like a slipped halo". The poems in this robust collection are indigenous affirmations of the experiences of so many marginalized people in the U.S., especially those who have been here all along. They never crossed the border, the changing border crossed them. 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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this innovative debut, Torres calls upon a wide range of traditional and postmodern forms, including prose and verse hybrids, couplets, lyric strophes, and fragments, unified by a concern with how writers can work within inherited constraints to expand the possibilities within them. "I'm leaving you with this," Torres warns, "a heap of words. Names layered between/ the stanzas of a poem that ends just before it rains." His poems are most moving in moments when experimentation and rebellion are met with a startling self-awareness, the lines reading as a reflection on his own craft and relationship to the reader as he contemplates boyhood and cultural assimilation. Many of these poems are remarkable for their dramatic tension, even as they reflect on ambitious questions of language, privilege, and power. He writes: "Thick glass between us, my brother and I each reach/ for a phone receiver. Mom and Dad behind me. His voice/ chipped with static. We have thirty minutes starting/ seven seconds ago." 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. (Oct.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

A "National Poetry" series pick, this propulsive first collection is so packed with poems vivifying a Mexican American man's painful split between community and aspiration, the crucial connections of youth and the rocky ride to assimilation, that's it's hard to choose what to quote. "I'm good/ at being American:" he declares, "I// clean up after my dog. I follow the paved/ path/ on runs. Sweat inside expensive sneakers./ I'm a great neighbor, even on morning strolls where I forget my ID and must worry/ about// police who need to make sure everyone is/ who they say they are." Meanwhile, he recalls an upbringing shaped by "Knuckles/ from big brothers asking why you flinched" and the homeboys he misses desperately, caught between worlds and forever feeling doubled. "I'm on a couch/ at the professor's house. And there are two// of me," he confides, and elsewhere he heeds his father's advice and takes two newspapers while paying for one: "one for yourself;/ one for who you cannot be." VERDICT A study of crossing cultures written with affecting urgency.

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