Scope and Contents This is the first edition of the book that is now in its third printing. Publishers Weekly: "AYYY: soy bilingual... pero BILINGUALISSIMO!... de nada!" screams the 18-point sans serif font of "A Nuyo-Futurist's Manfestiny," the Blast-like final section of this frenetic yet elegantly conceived collection. A deft recombination of digital media and information arts, mock multiculturalist imperatives, performance and sound poetry and post-Language subjective lyricism, Shock Worker is one more unexpected twist in the career of Torres, a New York poet who was once associated with the performance poets of the Nuyorican cafe. While some of the poems resemble exploded bilingual eye charts designed by El Lissitzsky or astrological diagrams for deviant religions, this book has lovely quiet moments; the delicate lyric "Separatist Invasion" is a little mantra against the alienated sensibility: "There have been a thousand sightings of people I used to know. Separations of copies of who it is they...

Scope and Contents

Using ambient language"-fragments, excerpts, stage directions, echoes, conversation snippets, syntactic undulation, and rigorous sonic chaos -- Edwin Torres creates an alchemy of language, what he calls "electrobabble" and "algorithmictotem." Amid the fast-paced frenzy of his lyrical style, Torres finds an excited reason for hope and purpose: "one by one/ the rhythmic yuwanna/ will climb the fearist/ the murmuring yugottit/ will find the liminal/ the metronomed howboutit/ will catch the kicker." Amid such restless verbal motion, things will happen, things must happen; as order will emerge from disorder, a sense of calm gradually suffuses THE POPEDOLOGY OF AN AMBIENT LANGUAGE. "This all impossible/ But I appear it on page, so/ Becomes possible on way-through page." This book is also designated Atelos 29. The front cover title contains colored letters PAGE. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.