Author Description

Poetry. With IN WHICH WE SEE OUR SELVES, Eric Torgersen begins with the formal structure of the ghazal as popularized by Agha Shahid Ali and unapologetically makes a more American thing of it, arguing in his Afterword that this transformation is as inevitable as what happens when the children of immigrant parents pass through an American junior high school: not everyone is pleased with the result. "I've tried to avoid faux- Eastern themes and tones," he writes. Fluently metrical and effortlessly rhymed, at times in short, hard-hitting lines with refrains as brief as a single word, these poems leap off the page with speech as American as this: 'My gang all quit when I didn't split the take right. / We crashed and burned when I didn't hit the brake right.' Following the common practice of "signing" the poems in the final couplet, Torgersen allows a chorus of voices selves? to speak of, to, for and even against this Eric, this 'Ric, this Torgersen, this Eric the Derrick, this Torgie. "Back Then," a tale of a life gone wrong, begins simply: 'I was just an average Joe back then. / I had no plans or dough back then. // Family gone, no friends to speak of, / I was feeling pretty low back then. // I started hanging out too much. / I had no place to go back then.' Seven couplets later, he signs with his given name, embedded in the name of his country: 'America, it wasn't you. / I did it. Long ago. Back then.' <br> <br> "There is wisdom here in Eric Torgersen's poems, wisdom and also humor (the poems make us feel that it is impossible to have one without the other.) Irony and tenderness along with wisdom and humor also move playfully in each other's company. And all these qualities are brought together under the aegis of a form as challenging to write as it is enticing to read. What joy these poems give and what a pleasure they offer to anyone lucky enough to be drawn into their orbit." Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings and Underground: New & Selected Poems <br> <br> "In