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Learn more“Virtuosic . . . one of our most talented and daring poets . . . Hivestruck crackles with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems
A poet whose work has focused on Puerto Rican and Latinx history and identity poses the question of what makes us human, and technology’s part in that process, through a decolonial lens
Vincent Toro’s third collection of poetry is a work of Latinxfuturism that confronts the enigmatic and paradoxical relationship human beings have with technology. The poems are a tapestry of meditations on social media and surveillance culture, satires on science fiction and the space race, interrogations of artificial intelligence, cyborg economics, and biohacking, and tributes to women and queer and BIPOC people who have contributed and are contributing to human survival and progress in a technology obsessed world.
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia and Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal.
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia and Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal.
Reviews
Praise for Hivestruck:“[A] deep and moving poetic exploration of our digital age. With a unique and decolonized gaze, Toro immerses us in a world where human relationships and technologies are intertwined in unexpected ways. From breakups with robots to the search for a fairer economy, Toro invites us to reflect on our identity in an increasingly technological world.” —People en Español
“The expansive third collection from puertoriqueño poet and performer Toro (Tertulia, 2020) scrutinizes and satirizes tech-obsessed contemporary life with gigapixel resolution. Vocally, stylistically, and typographically inventive, Toro's maximalist lyrics touch on connectivity, politics, consumerism, and aesthetics in electric language . . . Brilliant and buzzing, Toro's latest underscores his place as one of the preeminent poet-prophets of the Anthropocene.” —Booklist (starred review)
“The ever-inventive Toro takes a galactic step forward in his long-standing diasporican exploration of indomitable poetic forms, developing a cyborg poetics and politics that works as a critique of imperial technocapitalism and as an imagining of its ruptures . . . Amid all the cool noise and verbivocovisual explosions and expansions, I especially enjoyed the moments when Toro shows off his lyrical and formal rigor.” —Intervenxions, The Latinx Project at New York University
“Hivestruck is engaging and inventive, a book that explores the boundaries of poetry then boldly expands them.” —Largehearted Boy
“Vincent Toro’s virtuosic new collection Hivestruck shows how one of our most talented and daring poets engages with our socially mediated world, on screen and off, decoding and recoding to create an original aesthetic in the process. Crackling with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit, and utilizing an array of innovative forms and language, Hivestruck is poetry from the present and future worthy of the best buzz, 'provid[ing] . . . specs to build new / possibilities.'” —John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New & Selected Poems
“'The human,' writes Vincent Toro in Hivestruck, 'wants nothing more than to be anything BUT human.' And how the human becomes un-human is at the heart of this rip-roaring, cosmic art project that lives in the stars, in the sea, in fractals and conceptual forms that will blast out of our devices to transform our devivified brains. In these pages the multilingual, decolonial cyborg space claws its way through empire like an orchestra of 'inimitable energy.' This is the cyber poetry of the hungry, mutating body.” —Daniel Borzutsky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human
“Vincent Toro’s new work is a sweeping, and weeping, book of change, technology, old wounds, past forms and fresh approaches. Hivestruck is a sensitive and deeply considered work that plays with expectations of organization, skill, and meaning. It understands how we can be supersaturated in our senses and yet feel alone, tendrils reaching toward someone, something without disappearing, being swallowed whole. In reading this book we see ourselves, even in our hidden, quiet desperation. It’s where the hope is, when we learn we are not actually by ourselves. The community of us revealing our needs, is the truth. We are actually all together in all this as we can see in Vincent’s bold poetic vision.” —Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems and Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry Expand reviews