Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

TERTULIA

Vincent Toro

Readers of poets whose structurally inventive work explores Latinx and Boricua identity and experiences will love this fluid, expansive new collection from a poet whose work "dazzles with [an] energetic exploration of the Puerto Rican experience in the new millennium" (NBC News).

Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro's new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the "tertulia") and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism, and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the human condition.

Vincent Toro's debut poetry collection, STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC., was awarded the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He is also a Poet's House Emerging Poets Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, and winner of The Caribbean Writer's Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize and Repertorio Español's Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. Toro is a professor at Bronx Community College, a poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, a writing liaison for The Cooper Union's Saturday Program, and a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.

Available products
Book Published 2020-06-02 by Penguin Poets Trade Paperback

Comments

Tertulia is explosive; it detonates on all levels: tradition, comic, formalistic, political, and diaspora. There are not enough poetics in the world to define or categorize Toro's work. You might flinch when you read these poems, so arm yourself.

Percussive. raucous. delightfully erudite. Toro wields language like a new technology, and his lyrics burst with earthy energy. A poetic phenom, Toro should be read alongside Urayoán Noel, Edwin Torres, and Daniel Borzutzky.

Toro's book encapsulates an entire tertulia in print, capturing what Ramón Gómez de la Serna called an artistic 'place and event' in the early 20th century. As Louie Dean Valencia-García notes, the Spanish incarnation of the caféas opposed to the French salonwas 'held in the public sphere,' where the avant-garde could break established forms. Toro's book successfully captures this spirit; it arrives with different shades and sections, unified by his risks (and successes) with poetic language.

Tertulia struts around the edge of American civilization and the slant truth of history in poems saturated by an uninhibited discourse that engages the sublime and the low. His ekphrasis is cinematic, his lines symphonic. Toro makes 'testimonios stricken from public record known with his signature 'electromagnetic hand jive. This book excited and delights and provokes. Tertulia like it's 1999!

Toro's poetry is exuberant and often comic, celebrating Latinx identity and culture in America even as it flags injustice and inequality at every turn.

As proposed by James Baldwin in The Creative Process, Vincent Toro has taken up the artist's mantle to expose & mirror society's true conditions (and 'faces') to itself for the sake of liberation. You must bring your whole self to the reading of his work that explores the gamut of human error, evil, striving & triumph, while probing how complex, revelatory & potent language can be. These poems demand revolution in our ways of thinking, framing, creating & being.