Praise for Hivestruck "[A] deep and moving poetic exploration of our digital age. With a unique and decolonized gaze, Toro immerses us in a world where human relationships and technologies are intertwined in unexpected ways. From breakups with robots to the search for a fairer economy, Toro invites us to reflect on our identity in an increasingly technological world."
--People en Español "The expansive third collection from puertoriqueño 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 . . . Brilliant and buzzing, Toro's latest underscores his place as one of the preeminent poet-prophets of the Anthropocene."
--Booklist (starred review) "The ever-inventive Toro takes a galactic step forward in his long-standing diasporican exploration of indomitable poetic forms, developing a cyborg poetics and politics that works as a critique of imperial technocapitalism and as an imagining of its ruptures
. . . Amid all the cool noise and verbivocovisual explosions and expansions, I especially enjoyed the moments when Toro shows off his lyrical and formal rigor."
--Intervenxions, The Latinx Project at New York University "Vincent Toro's virtuosic new collection
Hivestruck shows how one of our most talented and daring poets engages with our socially mediated world, on screen and off, decoding and recoding to create an original aesthetic in the process. Crackling with Toro's critical vision and dazzling wit, and utilizing an array of innovative forms and language,
Hivestruck is poetry from the present and future worthy of the best buzz, 'provid[ing]
. . . specs to build new / possibilities.'"
--John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New & Selected Poems "'The human, ' writes Vincent Toro in
Hivestruck, 'wants nothing more than to be anything BUT human.' And how the human becomes un-human is at the heart of this rip-roaring, cosmic art project that lives in the stars, in the sea, in fractals and conceptual forms that will blast out of our devices to transform our devivified brains. In these pages the multilingual, decolonial cyborg space claws its way through empire like an orchestra of 'inimitable energy.' This is the cyber poetry of the hungry, mutating body."
--Daniel Borzutsky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human
"Vincent Toro's new work is a sweeping, and weeping, book of change, technology, old wounds, past forms and fresh approaches.
Hivestruck is a sensitive and deeply considered work that plays with expectations of organization, skill, and meaning. It understands how we can be supersaturated in our senses and yet feel alone, tendrils reaching toward someone, something without disappearing, being swallowed whole. In reading this book we see ourselves, even in our hidden, quiet desperation. It's where the hope is, when we learn we are not actually by ourselves. The community of us revealing our needs, is the truth. We are actually all together in all this as we can see in Vincent's bold poetic vision."
--Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems and Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry
