Vincent Toro’s Hurricane Formalism

Abstract

Vincent Toro’s poetry and essays critique the ways that US actions in the wake of natural disasters damage Puerto Rican ecologies and culture. The entwinement of colonialism and natural disaster is the subject of Toro’s two collections, Stereo. Island. Mosaic. (2016) and Tertulia (2020). These collections instruct readers to toggle between close reading of language and formal analysis of genre and shape. In Stereo, Toro produces a geo-formal poetics that takes a Taíno hurricane zemi as its central organizing form, an aesthetic choice that foregrounds non-Western literary forms in communicating Puerto Rican economic and ecological atmospheres. In Toro’s collections, the air and atmosphere are sites where anti-colonial critique and aesthetic innovation merge.