July 26, 2024
Capturing the zeitgeist, award-winning Puerto Rican poet Toro (Stereo.Island.Mosaic.) uses appropriately vivid, edgy writing to consider how technology has impacted people both individually and collectively. He tracks his life through screens, highlighting escalating change ("We're already bored with / what hasn't happened yet") and how it can subsume and disconnect. "She has her screen and I have mine," he offers, regretting that "I am an icon," and saying of a gamer, "He can't imagine wanting anything so badly. / He can't imagine." A punchy list of "St[r]atus Updates" ("Two cross-eyed mockingbirds play chess with dismantled satellites") reveals why, in its immediacy, poetry is an excellent vehicle for examining swift-moving social media, but Toro also makes readers aware of the social consequences; while the "technopoly has not found a way to exist with people, there are still wonderfully human by-products such as this, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and #MeToo." The occasional opaque pileup of imagery will lose some readers ("Hyte wild styles un cosmic flush time") but does effectively express people's confusion with tech lingo. VERDICT Energized observations for both younger readers, who will gleefully pull apart the inferences, and those who, like Toro, number "among the last generation to remember a time before the hive plugged in."--Barbara Hoffert
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Starred review from August 1, 2024
The expansive third collection from puertorique�o 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 that levels accusations with pinpoint precision: ""Lithium is stripped from Bolivia's hillsides so twentysomethings in Seattle can access Tinder."" Toro balances an unwavering severity with the tongue-in-cheek, already outdated, extremely niche phrasing of memes: ""konami code stasis / pwned jebaited in / supramarginal gyrus // no easter egg no extra / lives to be earned."" Other poems capture the unique ennui of an era inundated with infinite online choices yet beleaguered by unending unhappiness: ""We're already bored with / what hasn't happened yet."" In keeping with his futurist sensibilities, Toro reworks traditional poetic forms for an age fixated on big-tech corporate branding, including ""iD�cimas,"" and ""iArs Poetica,"" and ""iSestina: Guaguanc�okies.exe,"" which mimics the relentless mundanity of endless internet browsing: ""scroll ad scroll text pic scroll swipe ad text pic."" Brilliant and buzzing, Toro's latest underscores his place as one of the preeminent poet-prophets of the Anthropocene.
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