Ameriscopia

 
“Edwin Torres’ poetry is more than a high energy-construct — it is words and sounds gone wild, like dancers straining to break free of pattern. His prose poems are clusters of dazzling density that let ‘every sound in.’ And out. Everywhere, the borders have broken down. There is no other poet who writes like Torres. Elaborate, chanting, pointed, and granite in their ‘octaves of shine,’ his poems have it all. They are a real and gritty pleasure to read, a necessary tonic to these toxic times.” — John Yau, author of Further Adventures in Monochrome
 
“In Ameriscopia, Edwin Torres — lingo maestro of the ‘whyknows’ — casts a passionate, ironic, diasporic lens from symbolic hair to linguistic heart; where nothing fits in everything, where disparate beauty finds a space in the most beautiful of Nuyorican hazes. The brain’s language takes on a new lexicon undefined by sentiment, mercurial, and too quick to pin down into facile categorization. When poets say that language should be created, they mean ‘read Edwin Torres.’ ” — Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
 
“No one does what Edwin Torres does. He has always been a master of earnest incantatory narrations of life, love, and culture. But that’s only part of the deal. Ameriscopia is a testament to the way his art has evolved over twenty years. Here the alternating streams of the chilling, the comic, and the mesmerizing sweep the reader up into a landscape familiar but entirely new.” — Lisa Jarnot, author of Joie de Vivre, Selected Poems 1992-2012