Ramm:Ell:Zee’s Reboot (Non Elegy / iDécima)

Vincent Toro

…third rail plasmates break spraying boom                                                           formulas across Boogie down                               get slung and stunned by prince clown                                              Robo Moziz’s web of doom               plotting. Necro wealth got no room               for hybrid gente, see, so we                                              invoke the equation, the Zee,                               to loop life and lab synth ultra                                                           magnetic MCs y otrahylozoic mech entities.Hyte wild styles un cosmic flush time                                                           machine, un Ikonoklast rhizome                               of spectral ritmo portals minds roam                                              to snatch back the islands of dimes               empires embezzled and primed               for mass snacking después they crashed                                              on chill reefs. No grandmaster flashed                               their Alpha’s bet stance with so                                                           much Ionic coconaut glow.What other script toggler could splashcraniums of taxed mta                                                           surfers with petrol glyphs retooled                               to cure rubble trauma and school                                              fly whelps on how our emigre               elders become asphalt runways               suns sashay upon. El Robo                                              Moziz clan plan blasts barrios                               for mas billboard space y detains                                                           electric lexicons. Sly brainsalways possess the option toharvest flamboyant avatars,                                                           trap entropy in 808                               states. Sir Ramm don’t die, he gestates                                              into junk math and Bolivars               white flight of fancy, crafts lodestars               from soil of soul clap gang duck speak                                              for transhumanoids til the break                               of dawn. Ill Moziz evictions                                                           bend borough blocks for land barons,bureaucratize extinction quakes.But All them faux lords sweat the Ell’s                                                           technique. Won’t stop cats who future                               the fossil, remix selves, suture                                              stitch a red lego tux, rebel               with ecstatic chaos tech spells,               ride gettovett riff sub routines                                              into eighteen trillion silk screened                               dusks. There is no afterlife, y’all.                                                           No before. It’s perpetual.Just polychrome goth future dreams,Latinerd chrono mutinies                                                           of garbage gods in an uprock,                               upcycling Plutonian schlock                                              for the Brown pantheon party               spurring eccentric ecstasy.               Mozizm otra vez be slayed,                                              quantum slanguage byways get made                               of siphonophonic cargo,                                                           un regalo del hombre whoswore he was an average jose…

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Headshot of Vincent Toro

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of three poetry collections: Hivestruck (Penguin Random House, 2024), Tertulia (Penguin Random House, 2020), and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta, 2016), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. Vincent is also a recipient of the Letras Boricua fellowship, a partnership with the Flamboyan Foundation funded in part by the Carnegie Mellon Foundation. His poetry and prose have been published in dozens of magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, and Latino Poetry: the Library of America Anthology. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, and serves as a poetry editor for Kweli Literary Journal.

Cover of "Hivestruck" by Vincent Toro.

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Hivestruck
Penguin Random House
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“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

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.

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