Tertulia

by Vincent Toro

A 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.

Genres: Poetry, Latinx

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2020

About the author

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two previous poetry collections: Tertulia and Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile deJongh Literary Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for poetry. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, by Saul Williams, Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Até Mais: Latinx Futures, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. He is an assistant professor of English at Rider University, a Dodge Foundation poet, and a contributing editor for Kweli Journal.

Reviews

[Jeimy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems presents the aspects of the world people might rather forget about. Each poem contains a harsh reality depicted with a vocabulary that would send a logophile into a linguistic paroxysms.

These are not poems that I would normally enjoy or even appreciate. My review speaks volumes about the value of representation. Some of the poems in this book went straight to my Puerto Rican core and shook it awake. Others portrayed realities that affect my Latinx sisters and brothers. Others may contain universal truth that expand outward and touch hearts and minds all across our planet.

This is not a book I could have foreseen myself endorsing even a week ago, but here I am, telling you to pick it up and keep reading regardless of how uncomfortable it may make you. I, for one, think the journey will be worth it.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

From "On Appropriation"

"Grateful for the amnesty my crew bestowed me, I swore I would
not recklessly unsheathe those syllables again, for love may
prove to be unconditional, but it does not pardon those of us
who trample over provinces for which we hold no title" (34).

[Ellen Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this collection.

[Jeffery Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this collection exciting, mesmerizing. A tour de force of language-use and compacting of references (historical / current / pop).

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great to listen to- like going to a poetry slam. I enjoyed the modern anecdotal poems, particularly the appreciation of the janitor and another on the strong character of his wife.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I particularly liked “On Privilege.”

[Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and thought provoking. Would highly recommend.

[Amanda Martinez Kirby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and moving, this is one I’m going to buy so I can read again and again!