"Hopeful Spirit: A Review of Angela Narciso Torres's 'What Happens Is Neither'" by Kiara Hiatt

From memories and self-reflection, life lessons prove to become our greatest moments in time. The hard and intense justify the joyful and calm. Through loss, Angela Narciso Torres, the winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award for poetry and the author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021), shares her emotional experience of hardships and life lessons, creating a mutual connection of understanding with her readers. Journey with me through Torres’s perception of loss, reflection, and rediscovery that feels like a hopeful leap.
Torres starts strong with the poem, “If You Go to Bed Hungry,” and gives us the advice we didn’t know we needed. The superstitious guidelines go in a full circle, starting with “If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot,” and ending with, “Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath / to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick up each one.” Although the first and last lines are warnings, and each has a different connotation of rice, the poem doesn’t close off the reader, it encourages them to nourish their own souls and to be cautious in focusing time and effort on others more than themselves. After the warning in “If You Go to Bed Hungry,” the next piece, “Stone Fruit,” feels less heavy, but still manages to leave a small lump in your throat. Using a childhood metaphor, “If you swallow a seed, a tree will grow in your stomach,” Torres portrays her difficult and traumatic relationship with her mother. She reveals the generational trauma through the lines, “I nurture her sadness like a sapling,” and, “Feel the heft of sour-sweet drupes my mother’s tears have fed.” Having a connection to generational trauma through my parents as well, I found this piece to be the perfect balance of childhood-me wanting to please my parents and keep them happy, while slowly taking on their weaknesses and their pain. It is heartwarming to know that Torres has felt the same way.
In fact, the last lines of a couple of these pieces really made me reflect on my own life. The piece, “Feather,” has one of my favorite last lines: “The point / is how, armed with a feather, / I believed I could make a mark.” This line rattled me and made me feel understood in my passion to make my mark on the world, even if it is just a scratch. I felt sorrowful at first reading this piece, but then I realized, even though it questions one’s own worth with the line, “I’d make a dent?”, it also foregrounds confidence, in that it’s okay that our mark might be small, it is still a mark. Another spell-binding last line was from the piece “Slash-and-burn,” where Torres explains the aftermath of waiting. The last stanza, “wait. Be expensive—my grandmother / added. Grow scarce and he’ll spill / orchids at your feet. Like the lushness / of undergrowth after slash-and-burn. / The extravagance of a scar / after insult to the flesh,” made my heart hurt. The warnings of not shaving so soon, not talking to a boy so soon, etc., create warnings that speak to the soul. The last line particularly is contradictory because it refers to a scar as an “extravagance,” a benefit from the harm done to the flesh, even though scars are usually seen as weaknesses. Torres repaints the connotations of scars through her imagery and wisdom—even though harm will occur to the body, the healing will be beautiful.
The piece, “What Happens Is Neither,” connects the pieces with the idea that beginnings and endings are neither good nor bad, but they exist, and sometimes it’s better not to think too hard on them. Torres refers to the relationship between her parents and her mother’s Alzheimer’s that seems to increase every day. The last couple of lines, “A fork clangs / on the tile. I rinse a cracked cup. / I try not to think of endings,” I felt the most connected to because my great-grandma had Alzheimer’s for about fifteen years before she passed away, but, in actuality, we lost her to the dementia after five. Sometimes people’s endings don’t match up. I thought this was a beautiful way to pull the reader back into the entirety of the book, about how to not only deal with hardship, but to possibly learn and grow from it. I also thought the last poem, “Self-Portrait as Revision,” is a hopeful and uplifting note to leave us with because not only does it summarize the loss and heartbreak, but it reflects on how much one has grown and started anew. The last line, “I am hurricaned. Worn smooth again,” creates an impactful paradox. Even though she is destroyed, she becomes whole in the end, giving hope to readers that pain is temporary.
Angela Narciso Torres finds balance within What Happens Is Neither between realistic expectations about life and hardships and a calming connection. It connects her own experiences to the reader’s experiences. Although this is only a slight taste of the magnificent work to be found here, I cherish the deeper meanings of the entirety of the piece. Torres’s message allows me to recognize that hardships are inevitable in life, but that I am not alone, and I will come out stronger on the other side.

Kiara Hiatt

The Poetry Editor for MORIA's Issue Ten, Kiara Hiatt is an undergraduate student at Woodbury University, pursuing a major in Architecture and a minor in Professional Writing. With her free time, Kiara enjoys painting, reading, and writing her own poetry.

Headshot: Kiara Hiatt