Feel Recordings in the Evershift - by Edwin Torres (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In richly immersive and sonically engaging poems, American Book Award winner Edwin Torres sculpts language toward a landing place for sensorial and ecological input.

Torres's new collection, feel recordings in the evershift, investigates ecology and the body as fields of perception, seeking to record this felt world and allow the reader a chance to roam within their own recordings. A longtime teacher and performance artist, globally active in collaboration with many multidisciplinary communities, the poet explores placemaking as self-making, portraying for the reader the wide-ranging possibilities of poem making. This record of investigation and deep listening reveals poetry's ability to connect the body to the earth's continual shift. As we experience the ecopoetics formed through this process, we are asked to join Torres in challenging a poem's function on the page, in the reader, and within the world.

Review Quotes

"As Sun Ra teaches in his prose and his poetry and most of all his music, an expression of cosmological consciousness is very rarely expressed in the artist. Many poets are determined not to give themselves over to these impulses and resist them, not allowing their readers to become susceptible to leaving these questions suspended, if only for a moment, to allow in what Sun Ra might describe as the wavelength of this cosmology. It is precisely this source of music and precisely this source of consciousness which inhabits the poetry of Edwin Torres."

--Justin Desmangles, American Book Award citation

"Equal parts Joycean experimentalist, Nuyorican performance poet, New York School-style emoter and graphic concrete poet, Torres has been developing one of the most elaborate poetic hybrids around."

--Publishers Weekly

"Edwin Torres's poetry is more than a high energy-construct--it is words and sounds gone wild, like dancers straining to break free of pattern. His prose poems are clusters of dazzling density that let 'every sound in.' And out. Everywhere, the borders have broken down. There is no other poet who writes like Torres. Elaborate, chanting, pointed, and granite in their 'octaves of shine, ' his poems have it all. They are a real and gritty pleasure to read, a necessary tonic to these toxic times."

--John Yau

"Torres manifests himself, and his readers, by his act of writing. He calls forth what is unknown by naming it thusly, and dissolves any easy logics by troubling them in momentous, springboard fashion. With XoeteoX, Torres invites us to enter into this heady performance with him to reach past and on to the next truths and our future selves."

--Arkansas International

About the Author

Edwin Torres is a NYC native and the author of 14 books of poetry, including Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (Roof Books, awarded a 2022 American Book Award), Xoeteox: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat), and editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). Multi-disciplinary collaborations with a wide range of cultural nomads have contributed to the development of his bodylingo poetics. He has performed worldwide and received fellowships from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, The DIA Foundation, Arts MidHudson, among others. Anthologies include New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He is an Adjunct Poetry Professor at Columbia University and a resident of Beacon, NY.