Hivestruck

Capturing the zeitgeist, award-winning Puerto Rican poet Toro (Stereo.Island.Mosaic.) uses appropriately vivid, edgy writing to consider how technology has impacted people both individually and collectively. He tracks his life through screens, highlighting escalating change (“We’re already bored with / what hasn’t happened yet”) and how it can subsume and disconnect. “She has her screen and I have mine,” he offers, regretting that “I am an icon,” and saying of a gamer, “He can’t imagine wanting anything so badly. / He can’t imagine.” A punchy list of “St[r]atus Updates” (“Two cross-eyed mockingbirds play chess with dismantled satellites”) reveals why, in its immediacy, poetry is an excellent vehicle for examining swift-moving social media, but Toro also makes readers aware of the social consequences; while the “technopoly has not found a way to exist with people, there are still wonderfully human by-products such as this, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and #MeToo.” The occasional opaque pileup of imagery will lose some readers (“Hyte wild styles un cosmic flush time”) but does effectively express people’s confusion with tech lingo.