Hivestruck

By: Vincent Toro

Narrated by: Vincent Toro

Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

“Virtuosic . . . one of our most talented and daring poets . . . Hivestruck crackles with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

A poet whose work has focused on Puerto Rican and Latinx history and identity poses the question of what makes us human, and technology’s part in that process, through a decolonial lens

Vincent Toro’s third collection of poetry is a work of Latinxfuturism that confronts the enigmatic and paradoxical relationship human beings have with technology. The poems are a tapestry of meditations on social media and surveillance culture, satires on science fiction and the space race, interrogations of artificial intelligence, cyborg economics, and biohacking, and tributes to women and queer and BIPOC people who have contributed and are contributing to human survival and progress in a technology obsessed world.

©2024 Vincent Toro (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Vincent Toro’s virtuosic new collection Hivestruck shows how one of our most talented and daring poets engages with our socially mediated world, on screen and off, decoding and recoding to create an original aesthetic in the process. Crackling with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit, and utilizing an array of innovative forms and language, Hivestruck is poetry from the present and future worthy of the best buzz, 'provid[ing]...specs to build new / possibilities.'” —John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

“'The human,' writes Vincent Toro in Hivestruck, 'wants nothing more than to be anything BUT human.' And how the human becomes un-human is at the heart of this rip roaring, cosmic art project that lives in the stars, in the sea, in fractals and conceptual forms that will blast out of our devices to transform our devivified brains. In these pages the multilingual, decolonial cyborg space claws its way through empire like an orchestra of 'inimitable energy.' This is the cyber poetry of the hungry, mutating body.” —Daniel Borzutsky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human

“Vincent Toro’s new work is a sweeping, and weeping, book of change, technology, old wounds, past forms and fresh approaches. Hivestruck is a sensitive and deeply considered work that plays with expectations of organization, skill and meaning. It understands how we can be supersaturated in our senses and yet feel alone, tendrils reaching toward someone, something without disappearing, being swallowed whole. In reading this book we see ourselves, even in our hidden, quiet desperation. It’s where the hope is, when we learn we are not actually by ourselves. The community of us revealing our needs, is the truth. We are actually all together in all this as we can see in Vincent’s bold poetic vision.” —Tracie Morris, author of human/nature poems and Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry"