Michael Torres

Michael Torres spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His writing has been featured in POETRY, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders in An Incomplete List of Names as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions play on our understanding of ourselves. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him. He calls himself “the Pachuco’s grandson” or REMEK or Michael, depending on the context. He worries about losing his identification card, lest someone mistake his brown skin for evidence of a crime he never committed. He wonders what his students–imprisoned men who remind him of his high school friends and his own brother–make of him. When Torres returns to his hometown he finds that the spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind had been washed away. How to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured? Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of the United States praised Torres for “an uncharted and ‘incomplete,’ ever-flaming matrix of being and becoming a brown man, a person in an unknown America. Incredible, truth-fisted, shattering, groundbreaking.”