TO THE BONE

Exploring themes of growth, autonomy, life, and death, To the Bone’s pulsing rhythm splashes images on the page in a manner reminiscent of Cézanne.
-Sundress Publications

The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score where superstition is prelude and memory is encore. “What happens is neither the end nor the beginning. Yet we’re wired to look for signs.” Torres weaves in and out of time deftly, piecing together the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does through the veins in a leaf. These poems are a kundiman to motherhood, daughterhood, and what comes after. -Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, contest judge and author of HOUR OF THE OX

Through vibrant imagery and her observations of the everyday, Torres links past and present and uncovers the cross-time connections between mother and daughter—the advice passed down, the adages, the conflicts, and the histories of sadness. -Gustavo Hernandez, author of FORM HIS ARMS, reviewing for Libromobile.

“Trees know best the now of things,” the poet says in the book’s final stanza. In the slight inversions of syntax, the use of botanical certainties, the absence of an inhabited, stable narrator, Torres leaves us with the mother’s words lined up like rosary beads to fondle again, again. It is difficult to write loss in Alzheimer’s without losing the integrity of the subject, and I admire Torres’ skill in keeping love entire without minimizing the cruelty of diseases which attack memory." -Alina Stefanescu, reviewing TO THE BONE for Cleaver Magazine.

Saddle-stitch Paperback: 36 pages
Publisher: Sundress Publications
Publication Date: March 2020
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-951970-06-5
Product Dimensions: 6 x 6 inches
Copyright: 2020 Angela Narciso Torres
Printed by Minuteman Press, Boca Raton, FL

Proceeds to be donated to The Loveland Foundation, providing financial assistance to Black women and girls seeking professional, culturally appropriate therapy nationwide.

Proceeds from the first printing benefited RAICES (raicestexas.org), a nonprofit agency providing free and low-cost legal services, social programs, bond assistance, and advocacy to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees.