Michael Torres’s debut poetry collection, An Incomplete List of Names, captures the evanescent nature of love in its many forms. It is tender and forceful; bold and vulnerable. In each poem, acts of love between family, friends, but most importantly homies, burst from the page. We’re told in “All-American Mexican,” the first of three poems of that name, that homies “chased our I love yous with / laughter the way you cage the air / to catch a butterfly.” And in the same way, the images and words in this collection circumscribe that love.
Torres offers readers a glimpse into the myriad ways we shape ourselves, each other, and the world around us through love. Images of hands are scattered throughout the collection and they convey the gamut from cynical to the delicate touch between father and son: “Someone folds / the check into my hand while he finishes the fold / in my collar.” In another poem lines and their breaks are like the jabs and punches of hands: “Just us / and his brothers, yanking the gloves up / their skinny arms, lacing them / tight with their teeth, talking shit / between knots.” Even empty hands contain a multitude of possibilities:
Now, I stop
to read the wrinkles
that rest over my knuckles. I’m tired.
My hands outstretched. I want it to be okay
to see my skin as a landing pad
for little birds’ feet. My wrinkles
as mapped wind. I think they could
be a boy’s grid
for charting stars.
All the poems, with their images, rhythms, and line breaks, are a breathless fall up into the sky. Though no poem invokes people, places, loss, and love like “Elegy with Roll Call.” The breadth of this penultimate poem spans time and space (childhood to adulthood and Pomona to Mankato) to reach the particular present (in the backyard with the homies). Nothing and no one gets lost in this list just like nothing and no one gets lost in the collection.
An Incomplete List of Names is an incandescent litany that calls forth all the bits and pieces of us that we’ve lost on the way to becoming ourselves. It gestures to the past while looking forward, and from what I’ve read in this collection, the future is looking bright for Michael Torres. —Maivboon Vang