What Happens Is Neither - Paperback

by Angela Narciso Torres (Author)

A deeply-sensorial reflection on presence, absence, and the act of losing

"What Happens Is Neither / the end nor the beginning. / Yet we're wired to look for signs," offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres's latest collection, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In music, mantra, and prayer, Torres explores the spaces in and around grief--in varying proximity to it and from different vantage points. She writes both structurally formal poems that enfold the emotionality of loss and free verse that loosens the latch on memory and lets us into the sensory worlds of the speaker's childhood and present. In poems set in two countries and homes, Torres considers what it means to leave a mark, vanish, and stay in one place. In a profound act of recollection and preservation, Torres shows us how to release part of ourselves but remain whole

Author Biography

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, 2013) and To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020). Recent work appears in Poetry, Missouri Review, and Quarterly West. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She won the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York) and was named one of NewCityLit's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago in 2016. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry. She lives in Southern California.