Vincent Toro
Vincent Toro is the author of Stereo.Island.Mosaic, which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Ahsahta Press and the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America. He earned an MFA in poetry from Rutgers and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. Toro is the recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. His poems have been published in the Buenos Aires Review, Codex, Rattle, Cortland Review, Vinyl, Hawai’I Review, Washington Square Review, Paterson Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Toro teaches at Bronx Community College and is a writing liaison at The Cooper Union Saturday Program, as well as a poet in the schools for the Dreamyard Project and the Dodge Poetry Foundation. Source
Areyto for the Shipwrecked: The Case for Spanglish
Because a corazón is more resilient than a heart, sangre richer than
blood. Because when my abuelo’s spleen ruptured right there on
Queens Boulevard he yanked himself up with nothing but smog
to hold onto and walked home fifteen blocks before collapsing
on the bathroom floor. That takes babilla. Simple courage won’t do.
Because songs are nice but a cancion bathes inside the veins.
The dankdim nightclub lounges of my youth gave me confidence,
it’s true, but only Hector Lavoe’s rooster calls can resurrect the dead,
only Celia’s “azucar!” incites warring tribes to fall in love. Because
an abrazo can shield you from famine and flame. A hug just lacks
that kind of sorcery. Because bochinche is both science and art.
It can turn men into rats and spread through the respiratory system
like a viral infection. Gossip is clearly no match for bochinche.
Because el sol is spirit. The sun, her child. And a besito is sweeter
than any kiss. Because arboles are monasteries for the lost, while
men don’t think twice about felling trees. Because dios inspires
humility like no god can. Because vida blossoms from the mouth
like a fulgent garden, whereas life is merely the title of a children’s
game, a syllable in search of a hyphen.
Published:
2020
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Bilingual
Family
Intersectionality & Culture
Literary Devices:
Alliteration
the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing