What Happens Is Neither
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A deeply-sensorial reflection on presence, absence, and the act of losing
“What Happens Is Neither / the end nor the beginning. / Yet we’re wired to look for signs,” offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres’s latest collection, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In music, mantra, and prayer, Torres explores the spaces in and around grief—in varying proximity to it and from different vantage points. She writes both structurally formal poems that enfold the emotionality of loss and free verse that loosens the latch on memory and lets us into the sensory worlds of the speaker’s childhood and present. In poems set in two countries and homes, Torres considers what it means to leave a mark, vanish, and stay in one place. In a profound act of recollection and preservation, Torres shows us how to release part of ourselves but remain whole
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this moving second book, a meditation on love, loss, memory, and motherhood, Torres (Blood Orange) faces the grueling reality of Alzheimer's symptoms that have eroded her mother's cognition. As her mother forgets, Torres documents their history, along with the painful daily reminders of the illness. "I am glass/ shattered, smoothed// by my mother's nerves, pillowed beneath/ her cheek. Counted, accountable, counting,/ counted on," she writes in "Self-Portrait as Rosary Beads." In "Disappearing Act," she remembers attending a family party as a child, painting the scene in rich, sensory detail as if to offer what her mother might not recall: "From a far table, the rumble of mah-jongg tiles being shuffled by a quorum of matrons,/ their lacquered nails clicking, wreathed in/ cigarette smoke." The poems vary in form, with prose poems interspersed between those made up of couplets and other formations. Torres's lines read effortlessly no matter their construction, breaking smoothly and fluidly, like the unraveling of memory. This collection succeeds as an altogether tender, arresting exploration of what it means to lose something essential.
