The name REMEK claims dream space in a racist carceral state, is a bond and a pact. Sometimes, the name lies to refuse throwing an unjust punch. As Torres reflects on these earlier decisions, he sees them as part of a larger set of commitments that he’s confirming to himself and expanding upon. The name is agency and creative integrity. REMEK. Poet. The two names meet one another in the second poem titled “All-American Mexican,” and there’s a recognition:
I’m sure to forget. Once, back in California,
my homie saw me pull the pad out, and
called me the Sensitive Poet. Therefore, I
was. It doesn’t surprise me now, how easily
I come apart. But around the guys, he traced
a tear down his cheek. My homies chuckled
with their chests, all muscle tee and tattoo.
I did not mind. Not for a long time. A cloud
is only a room that fills and fills. Then a door
opens, everything barreling out.
An Incomplete List of Names must also be read as the coming of age of a young poet, testing himself and returning again and again to the source of his creativity, not to elevate his homies through a long lens of nostalgia, but to pay homage to the fire of mind and body that moves them. How to handle that fire? Yes, Torres writes a country: “it fits onto this very page.” He holds accountable an “American-manufactured masculinity / at its finest.” Yet it’s not what his collection reveals about America or masculinity that alone makes it so gripping. It’s where he leads us, as he follows his singular imagination into a dusty field:
I want to write a poem with horses galloping through it
but I don’t know much about horses anymore, except that
they do gallop, and I’m only reminded of this by a movie
I fell asleep watching.
When I was a boy, I’d watch
through a fence as horses shook their manes and galloped
around the ranch next to where my grandfather lived. Perhaps
that part about galloping isn’t true. I follow my imagination
more than I should, at least far enough to end this poem with
a charge of horses departing in a cloud of dust or however it is
they vanish. Because they do.
In the collection’s final poem, “Horses,” love arrives as “a shift / of attention the heart demands, a refocusing.” This is the arrival of an astonishing poet, who has learned how a poem “advances through the tall grass by itself, how it refuses / to sunset. Sometimes, // leaving doesn’t mean anything / besides ember fading under the earth.” This vitality continues in other forms; its list is incomplete. So capacious is its power. This is the debut of a major new talent, whose loyalty to the names is a commitment to imagination, whose fierce beauty and insights leave an indelible mark, again and again after each reading.