Blood Orange
Willow Books Literature Awards Grand Prize Winner for Poetry.
"Angela Narciso Torres' Blood Orange immerses the reader in the vital sights, sounds, and smells of childhood, family, and living. Torres makes life the "punishing sweet" of a blood orange: ripe, full, and eager to be experienced and understood (50). The memories of the past hang like fragrant fruit on a tree, waiting to be tasted through Torres' vivid imagery. In Torres' poetry, ephemeral moments find roots and blossom, captured and potent forever..."
Pirene's Fountain, A Journal of Poetry
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The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; she to whom every soil is as her native one is already strong; but she is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place," so Hugh of St. Victor wrote over six hundred years ago . . . In Blood Orange, these words find a rich and vitally new embodiment for our own time. At once vividly present in the moment and fully attuned to the under-dwelling currents of history . . . Torres' poems affirm and achieve a hard-won continuity of feeling and insight. [These] poems move with the fluid assurance of a dancer, and sing with enviable lyric grace.
Daniel Tobin, author of five books of poems including Second Things and Belated Heavens, 2011 Massachusetts Book Award winner
Because paying attention is a form of prayer, Angela Narciso Torres's poems pay deep and close attention. The details of these poems are stitched together with great care, and what we get is not just the landscape of memory but also the landscape of family, which in the end is the god we really pray to when we are restless. These are beautiful and beautifully made poems.
C. Dale Young, poetry editor of New England Review and author of Torn and The Second Person
There's something lush and holy in these poems that slip between generations, between daughterhood and motherhood. Blood Orange elegantly charts the mysteries of family and place, time and its uncertainties, with a keen vision that is at once sensual, entrancing and deeply felt. Line by careful line, Torres brings forward an enchanting poetry, with "two fingers on the pulse like the true point / of a divining rod," always ready to lead us to water or love--the currents that shimmer beneath this book's rich surfaces.
Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines, winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize
