An Incomplete List Of Names

"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."