Hivestruck

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“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.Advance praise for Hivestruck:

“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

“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 PoetryVincent 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.US

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