Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro’s new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the “tertulia”) and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the human condition.

In this reading and conversation, Penguin poets Willie Perdomo and Vincent Toro dive into the legacy and poetics of the Nuyorican Movement, its influence on their work, and its impact on American poetry over the last 50 years.

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, director, and educator. He is the author of “STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC.” and “Tertulia.” His work has been published in dozens of magazines and journals, including Washington Square, BOAAT, Rattle, Vinyl, The Acentos Review, The Buenos Aires Review, Chiricu Journal of Latino/a Literatures, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext.  Vincent is director of the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a professor of English at Bronx Community College, a Dodge Foundation poet, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.

Willie Perdomo is the author of THE CRAZY BUNCH, winner of the 2019-2020 New York City Book Award for poetry, THE ESSENTIAL HITS OF SHORTY BON BON, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, SMOKING LOVELY, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He is also a co-editor of the BreakBeat Poetry Series anthology, LATINEXT. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Best American Poetry 2019, and African Voices. He is currently a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow, a core faculty member at VONA/Voices of our Nation Writing Workshop, and teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Getting Dusmic: The Nuyorican Poetic Tradition