An Incomplete List Of Names
by Michael Torres
Buy on AmazonAn astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own. Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions each play on our understanding of ourselves in An Incomplete List of Names. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him. His description of his childhood is both idyllic and nightmarish, sometimes veering between the two extremes, sometimes a surreal combination of both at once.…
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"One line sticks out to me from early in Michael Torres’ debut poetry collection, An Incomplete List of Names: “Most often I want to be / uncategorized.” These poems wrestle with the tension between knowing who you are, and knowing that you can’t be all parts of yourself in all places. That titular incomplete list of names goes back and forth between being that “foo” on the streets of Pomona, or a poetry teacher in a prison, or the guy who unironically mentions his “homies” back home in California to an incredulous partygoer in Minnesota. Torres writes in the poem “[Mexican] America”: “He tells me, when buying the newspaper, pay for one / but make sure to take two: one for yourself; / one for who you cannot be.” It’s not just the presence of who we are, but the absence of who we are not."
NPR Books We Love — 2020 · apps.npr.org