books.
What Happens Is Neither
Four Way Books (2021)
"This stunning volume illuminates scenes of domesticity from within like summer lanterns made from mason jars full of fireflies." --Booklist
Praise from Tim Seibles
In What Happens Is Neither, Angela Narciso Torres has jimmied the lock to a house of intricate family memory and sumptuous wisdom. These are poems of intense reflection and loss, but also of rediscovery and delight. As the years pass and one becomes overwhelmed by what is remembered and all that has been forgotten, such poems might restore the balance that allows us to live with and beyond that loud clanging in the heart.
Praise from Eleanor Wilner
Nights, listening to Bach, ‘it turned her sadness into something she recognized.’ The grace of these eloquent poems is in precisely such recognition. In images drawn from nature (‘what the body remembers’) and a pitch perfect ear, her lines reach the profound sadness and beauty of human existence, finding speech for what both demands and resists utterance. She writes like the craftsman of her poem whose ‘tools, like locusts, peel the tattered layers / that drift like early snow, the wood’s deep grain exposed.
Order WHAT HAPPENS IS NEITHER here.
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To the Bone
Sundress Publications (2020)
Praise from Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score
where superstition is prelude and memory is encore. “What happens is
neither the end nor the beginning. Yet we’re wired to look for signs.”
Torres weaves in and out of time deftly, piecing together
the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter
writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms
of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does
through the veins in a leaf. These poems are a kundiman
to motherhood, daughterhood, and what comes after.
Order TO THE BONE here.
Sundress Publications (2020)
Praise from Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score
where superstition is prelude and memory is encore. “What happens is
neither the end nor the beginning. Yet we’re wired to look for signs.”
Torres weaves in and out of time deftly, piecing together
the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter
writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms
of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does
through the veins in a leaf. These poems are a kundiman
to motherhood, daughterhood, and what comes after.
Order TO THE BONE here.
Blood Orange
Grand Prize Winner for Poetry
2013 Willow Books Literature Awards
Praise from Matthew Olzmann
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.
Order BLOOD ORANGE here
Grand Prize Winner for Poetry
2013 Willow Books Literature Awards
Praise from Matthew Olzmann
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.
Order BLOOD ORANGE here
