Tertulia

June 15, 2020
The rhythmic latest from Toro (Stereo.Island.Mosaic) is steeped in spoken word beats as it addresses such contemporary issues as immigration, gun violence, and income inequality. The book is divided into five “acts,” its poems often reading as short and evocative scenes with cinematic imagery. In the opening “On Battling (Baltimore Strut),” descriptions of dancers in a nightclub are juxtaposed with the language of war: “a single shirtless/ seraph unfurls himself/ upon the tarmac. Flexing/ faux leather, he gyrates, feather-/ glides, thunderclaps, then jukes/ toward the 16,000-pound/ armored personnel carrier.” In “Core Curriculum Standards: P.S. 137,” the poet tours a public school: “chip wrappers wet/ newspapers rusty nails/ gym shoe musk/ ambling through unkempt/ hallways fissure fresco/ of soda stains.” The standout poem is the moving elegy “Puerto Rico Is Burning Its Dead,” presumably written in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. The title phrase is woven throughout as a haunting refrain, while the speaker narrates a litany of atrocities: “Oxygen is put on the black market. Bones are used/ to hold up infected roofs. Unidentified remains/ get poured like concrete into jilted lungs.” While non sequiturs occasionally dilute the poems’ impact, this is an energetic effort by a supremely original voice.

June 1, 2020
In his percussive second collection, Puerto Rican poet Toro convenes a raucous tertulia, a kind of artistic social gathering popular in Latin America. Toro's delightfully erudite poems converse with film theory, pop and classical music, core curriculum, colonial and imperial legacies, and native Caribbean histories. Whether dissecting notions of privilege or interpreting American horror movies as thinly veiled anti-Latinx propaganda, Toro wields language like a new technology ("Discarnate appendages uprooting // cassava via livestream"), and his lyrics burst with earthy energy. Toro addresses the exploitation by financiers of his island home ("Cataclysm / as plum with financial prospects"), but also celebrates his heritage with a number of areytos, a Ta�no word originally used to refer to a communal song and dance. Not without a sense of humor, Toro ridicules an infamous Fox News chyron that referred to "three Mexican countries" and delivers an "NSFW Poem for Dirty Minds" about household chores and everyday errands. A poetic phenom, Toro should be read alongside Urayo�n Noel, Edwin Torres, and Daniel Borzutzky.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2020

A poem in this second collection from award-winning poet Toro (Stereo.Island.Mosaic.) is titled "Human Instamatic," and that he is, unfurling visually acute poems in a rich linguistic impasto that never obscures what is happening. Divided into five acts, the collection is presented as a tertulia, gatherings for discussed typically held in someone's home in Spain or Latin America, and is further framed by multiple references to films and film techniques that amplify the sense of movement and image. Throughout, Toro addresses the harsh realities of the Latinx outsider experience in America: "The killer is always Brown," he says in "Latinxorcismos," elsewhere noting "Illegal my eyes/ ....Unforgiven for surging/ into dialect." A series of poems titled "Cicatrices" (healing via scar tissue) evoke family damage; another series, "Core Curriculum Standards," hollows out readers with visions of a truly substandard, unenlightened school experience. The icepick-perceptive "Appropriation" shifts views to note of friends, "though none of our forebears/ slept in the big house, their bisabuelos were chained to trapiches, / while my bisabuelo was most likely ordained to wield the lash that struck them." VERDICT A rich, ambitious, and inventive observation of Latinx life in America.

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