An astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own.
Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions each play on our understanding of ourselves in An Incomplete List of Names. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him.
His description of his childhood is both idyllic and nightmarish, sometimes veering between the two extremes, sometimes a surreal combination of both at once. He calls himself “the Pachuco’s grandson” or REMEK or Michael, depending on the context, and others follow his lead. He worries about losing his identification card, lest someone mistake his brown skin for evidence of a crime he never committed. He wonders what his students—imprisoned men who remind him of his high school friends and his own brother—make of him. He wonders how often his neighbors think about where he came from, if they ever do imagine where he came from.
When Torres returns to his hometown to find the layers of spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind to prove their existence have been washed away by well-meaning municipal workers, he wonders how to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured.
About the Series
Established in 1978, the National Poetry Series is a literary awards program which sponsors the publication of five books of poetry each year. The manuscripts, solicited through an annual Open Competition, are selected by poets of national stature and published by a distinguished group of trade, university, and small presses.
“[A] standout first collection . . . Torres steps into the sphere of such clarion American poets as Luis Rodriguez, Raúl Salinas, Juan Felipe Herrea, and Carlos Cumpián. His is a welcome voice in the chorus telling the essential story of the Latinx experience of home.”
—Booklist
“A study of crossing cultures written with affecting urgency.”
—Library Journal
“Many of these poems are remarkable for their dramatic tension, even as they reflect on ambitious questions of language, privilege, and power. . . .In this accomplished volume, language can be the ‘thick glass between us,’ impeding connection and understanding, but Torres’s writing offers a vision that is startling and far-reaching.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In his magnificent enumerations; his allegiances; his ordeals of self, figure, and desire, Michael Torres gives us an uncharted and ‘incomplete,’ ever-flaming matrix of being and becoming a brown man, a person in an unknown America. Incredible, truth-fisted, shattering, groundbreaking.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Imagine
“This spectacular collection of acutely conscious poems awakens readers to our universal need to belong. . . . He speaks to the constant naming and renaming of the self and others at the intersection of multiple identities and perceptions through an arresting voice that is provocative yet vulnerable, urban yet serene, mournful yet buoyant.”
—Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country
“With poems that drop like beads of acid on paper, sizzling away first impressions and assumptions, revealing in their burning wake the underlayer of truth, and how it, after years, still smarts and bleeds and blossoms in us. I love this book more than I have any other book in a long time . . . celebrating our duality, the multitudinous breadth and depth of our varied and bounteous humanity.”
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand
“Absence doesn’t simply haunt Michael Torres’s poems: it blazes through them. . . . Torres is an exhilarating writer, a virtuoso who lets us hear what language can erase and create—while making it sing.”
—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine
Foreword by Raquel Salas Rivera
Doing Donuts in an ’87 Mustang 5.0, after My Homie Chris Gets Broken Up With
All-American Mexican
Hired as Professional Mourner at Funeral
The Pachuco’s Grandson Smokes His First Cigarette after Contemplating Masculinity
The Flame
Minutes, at the Health Clinic
Learning to Box
[Mexican] America
On Being REMEK
Down | I
Clothespins
Push
The Very Short Story of Your Knuckles
Teaching at the Prison in December
The Pachuco’s Grandson Considers Skipping School
Because My Brother Knows Why It’s Called County Blues, but Won’t Tell Me
After José Clemente Orozco’s Man of Fire
Down | II
[White] America
My Brother Is Asking for Stamps
All-American Mexican
Suspended from School, the Pachuco’s Grandson Watches Happy Days While His Homie Fulfills Prophecy
Stop Looking at My Last Name Like That
Down | III
After the Man Who Found Me Doing Burpees at the Park Said: “I Can Tell You Learned Those on the Inside.”
Ars Poetica
My Hometown as a Man Riding a Bicycle with No Chain
My Neighbor Who Keeps the Dying Things
Visits
Elegy with Puppet Strings
From My Classroom Window at the Prison, before Students Arrive
The Pachuco’s Grandson Considers the Silversun Pickups’ Album Diana Lent Him When They Last Spoke Seven Years Ago
1991
All-American Mexican
Elegy with Roll Call
Horses
Acknowledgments, Thank-Yous, and Shout-Outs
Notes
- “¡Unidos and Inclusive for a Stronger Nation!: A Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month Reading List, ” Beacon Broadside, blog
- “The Glorious Next Steps of the Next Generation of Chicano Poetry,” On the Seawall, write-up
- “Portrait of My Brother at Thirteen and 5’2,” The New Yorker, original poem
- “The Books That Got Away,” Code Switch/NPR, book mentioned in episode “The Books That Got Away”
- “Pockets,” Poets.org, original poem
- “NPR’s Best Books of 2020,” NPR’s Book Concierge, featured in their holiday round up of recommended titles
- “2019 National Poetry Series Winners,” Miami Book Fair, virtual conversation with Raquel Salas Rivera
- “Heading North to Become
a Poet,” Literary Hub, original essay
- “The Mentor Series: Michael Torres and Richard Robbins,” The Rumpus, Q&A