Blood Orange: Poems
Grand Prize Winner for Poetry
Willow Books Literature Awards
The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner;
she to whom every soil is as her native one is already strong; but she is perfect
to whom the entire world is as a foreign place,” so Hugh of St. Victor wrote
over six hundred years ago . . . In Blood Orange, these words find a rich and vitally
new embodiment for our own time . . . At once vividly present in the moment
and fully attuned to the under-dwelling currents of history, . . .Torres’ poems affirm
and achieve a hard-won continuity of feeling and insight. [These] poems move
with the fluid assurance of a dancer, and sing with enviable lyric grace.
~Daniel Tobin, author of From Nothing, The Net, and Belated Heavens
Grand Prize Winner for Poetry
Willow Books Literature Awards
The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner;
she to whom every soil is as her native one is already strong; but she is perfect
to whom the entire world is as a foreign place,” so Hugh of St. Victor wrote
over six hundred years ago . . . In Blood Orange, these words find a rich and vitally
new embodiment for our own time . . . At once vividly present in the moment
and fully attuned to the under-dwelling currents of history, . . .Torres’ poems affirm
and achieve a hard-won continuity of feeling and insight. [These] poems move
with the fluid assurance of a dancer, and sing with enviable lyric grace.
~Daniel Tobin, author of From Nothing, The Net, and Belated Heavens
Because paying attention is a form of prayer, Angela Narciso Torres’s poems
pay deep and close attention. The details of these poems are stitched together
with great care, and what we get is not just the landscape of memory but also
the landscape of family, which in the end is the god we really pray to
when we are restless. These are beautiful and beautifully made poems.
~C. Dale Young, author of The Halo, Torn, and The Second Person.
pay deep and close attention. The details of these poems are stitched together
with great care, and what we get is not just the landscape of memory but also
the landscape of family, which in the end is the god we really pray to
when we are restless. These are beautiful and beautifully made poems.
~C. Dale Young, author of The Halo, Torn, and The Second Person.
There's something lush and holy in these poems that slip between generations,
between daughterhood and motherhood. Blood Orange elegantly charts
the mysteries of family and place, time and its uncertainties, with a keen vision
that is at once sensual, entrancing and deeply felt. Line by careful line,
Angela Narciso Torres brings forward an enchanting poetry, with "two fingers
on the pulse like the true point / of a divining rod," always ready to lead us
to water or love—the currents that shimmer beneath this book's rich surfaces.
~Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines
between daughterhood and motherhood. Blood Orange elegantly charts
the mysteries of family and place, time and its uncertainties, with a keen vision
that is at once sensual, entrancing and deeply felt. Line by careful line,
Angela Narciso Torres brings forward an enchanting poetry, with "two fingers
on the pulse like the true point / of a divining rod," always ready to lead us
to water or love—the currents that shimmer beneath this book's rich surfaces.
~Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines
What Angela Narciso Torres seeks, and what she gives us again and again
in these fine poems—when she sees a branch bent by the weight
of blood oranges the children have already picked and eaten, when she
remembers the warm scent of night jasmine drifting into the window
from the porch, when she describes her father’s care with the remnant of
a bar of soap gone thin during the days of her mother’s absence--
what she finds, beyond the tropical landscape of her childhood,
is the amazing vividness of a world that flourishes
in the moment of its vanishing.
~Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their WIngs to Cry
in these fine poems—when she sees a branch bent by the weight
of blood oranges the children have already picked and eaten, when she
remembers the warm scent of night jasmine drifting into the window
from the porch, when she describes her father’s care with the remnant of
a bar of soap gone thin during the days of her mother’s absence--
what she finds, beyond the tropical landscape of her childhood,
is the amazing vividness of a world that flourishes
in the moment of its vanishing.
~Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their WIngs to Cry