Quanundrum: [i will be your many angled thing]

Author: Edwin Torres

Publisher: Roof Books (2021)

Edwin Torres’ quanundrum emerges from his “many angled” selves—writer, father, Puerto Rican, No’merican, worker, designer, acolyte, master—for readers to revel in. Torres’ poetry is always driving for transformation. The poetics of his language bridges his neo-immigrant identity to the universal situation of humans finding their place in the cosmos. quanundrum explores these problems of hybridity in bodies, themes, and the physicality of Torres’ visual poetics that refracts through an ecology of language as a call for readers to invent new possibilities every time they turn the page.

Torres’ skills at shaping these pages, composed of word forms, word meanings, and words interacting into poetry, speak “to the positive motivating force within my life.” The power of his writing derives from that tension as he simultaneously chooses which world to write as his world chooses him. quanundrum is a shock to the system as he settles into fluid motion—pretty sure you will feel better after reading Edwin Torres “[I will be your many angled thing].”

"Edwin Torres’ book of poems quanundrum expresses itself with a wisdom not unlike energy that probes its own expanse akin to aphoristic exploration. These poems spontaneously engage a depth that magically respond to themselves. With an expanded lexicon they explore regions of the human psyche that remain poetically precise so that their sonic contact engages verbal magnetism athletically merging with a plane that remains the uncountable."

–Will Alexander

"In quanundrum [i will be your many angled thing], Edwin Torres parts from the waste of digital impulse towards a reading in which poetry is, in essence, a reaching beyond whim, beyond a performance of the obvious. This series of poems about fatherhood and Boricuaness, among other things, challenges a simple reading of the reality of our desires as a brief moment. Torres searches for that lost image that we must honor, because we were once something, which means that we still are—beyond a vulnerability assigned by others or by ourselves. A brave and powerful book that argues for pause and reflection before writing and reading."

–Ricardo Maldonado

"Detect language: No’merican, one exceeding all algorithmic logic and dancing on the page to the beat of its own rhythmic isle-logic. And so it is that Torres’ gloriously kinetic poems, offering 'something of our movable uncertainties,' bodyflow to ever-fertile spaces of in-betweenness, past words’ edges, off the grid, full bleed, punto. This is amazing work, it sure raises the bar.

–Mónica de la Torre

"To slide among several of Torres’s many books, internet readings and astonishing performance pieces, is to immerse oneself in a world brimming with extraordinary energy, across a dizzying array of embodiments and traces, by turns passionate, funny, intense, charming, disarming, disturbing. There, in the shifting polyphonic, we sense a ductile space where valved voice, throat sounds and not-quite-words, lull, hum, and reshape what a body (or is it two bodies) feels like, labile bodies reshaping valved voice in turn. One wants to call him a force of nature, which doesn’t of course preclude his being, for sure, a force of culture."

–Tenney Nathanson

"Edwin Torres is our 21st Century Mayakovsky."

–Juliana Spahr