Blood Orange

Blood Orange engaged me right away in the way it was to keep and hold me throughout its pages, both with the blurred penumbra of memory and the sharp-focus specificity of image and metaphor Torres masters to serve her poems, not overwhelm them. “ … How far / to the cogon grass that watched my shadow / lengthen to the edges of day” (“To Return to San Juan,” 11). Throughout the book, her musings on small moments demonstrate that she knows how – and when – to lift the quotidian to insight, without being oracular or didactic.You don’t have to read far to get to one of her delightful metaphors: In “Blood Mother,” she ends with “Monsoon to monsoon, we swallowed our questions / like puffs of air a balloon exhales before it bursts” (13). Her poems hold these imaginative gifts throughout the volume, and they simultaneously illustrate and illuminate while bringing simple joy to the reader for their creativity and spark.And while her language shimmers on the page, her themes of familial life, its chimera of joy, its reality of shadows, make the poems repeatedly readable, capable of being mined more than once, always with profit. “Paris Aubade” is one of my favorites, and made both my husband and me cry, in the most satisfying of ways. Its last stanza is worth the price of admission alone.

Fun to read and can relate to some of the poems - very creative and well written - highly recommended

Angela Narciso Torres's poems call to mind the best work of the late great Seamus Heaney. Like Heaney, Torres digs deep into the fertile details of ordinary life and shows how profoundly defined we are by the people and places we come from. Her power as a poet comes from her ability to associate sounds, scents and colors with the core issues we all must face as we move through life. Throughout the book she is a watchful, listening, ultimately clairvoyant presence. And this posture enables her to connect the sound of a piano through a window, "boy smells" of talc and metal, the sight of her mother expertly putting on her nylons, and the pungent odors of the sea with entire destinies. In each poem we are reminded of the paradoxical nature of life: how everyone and everything is at once permanent and fleeting. We are also reminded of how the personal and historical past is always in our blood, and how even in our absence, the future will somehow contain us. I know a book of poetry is good if it keeps beckoning to me. This is that kind of book. I keep returning, re-reading and being rewarded for the effort.