With book tours canceled and many bookstores closing for at least the next few weeks, I offered to help promote new books. So this content is from the author, rather than a book review. I’m only working with publishers and/or authors that I trust to produce/publish quality work.

Exploring themes of growth, autonomy, life, and death, Angela Narciso Torres’s To the Bone splashes images on the page in a manner reminiscent of Cézanne. This is a book about motherhood, daughterhood, and personhood. Drawing on Torres’
background of growing up in the Philippines and immigrating to the United States, these impressionistic poems are moments captured in medias res, in the middle of the narrative, or shortly thereafter.

A fork dropped, the air in the room after a door closes, a square of sun—these celebrations of the quotidian, these portraits of simple beauty, imbue readers with a sense of ominous calm. The quiet after the storm. One moment of contemplation after a cataclysm. These are poems to think about.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, author of Hour of the Ox, says of this chapbook, ”The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score where superstition is prelude and memory is encore. ‘What happens is neither the end nor the beginning. Yet we’re wired to look for signs.’ Torres weaves in and out of time deftly, piecing together the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does through the veins in a leaf. These poems are a kundiman to motherhood, daughterhood, and what comes after.”

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books, 2013) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021) and winner of the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and PANK. A graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She serves as the reviews editor for RHINO. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently lives in South Florida.

Read the chapbook at: http://www.sundresspublications.com/echaps.htm
Purchase a signed print copy from angelatorrespoet.bigcartel.com. Proceeds will benefit RAICES, a non-profit agency providing free or low-cost legal services, social programs, and advocacy to immigrants, refugees, and their families.