Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters

The title of Lagares's recent collection would lead you to expect a depressing read of degradation. Not so. Although presenting the damage and struggle in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria as well as personal struggles on both the island and the mainland, La Torre Lagares's manipulation of imagery and language evokes vivid visuals and is a pleasure to read. 

~Michele Shaul, Director, Center for Latino Studies, Queens University of Charlotte

In this outstanding collection, Puerto Rican poet Elidio La Torre Lagares' shrewd use of literary appropriation and postmodern sense of irony samples the work of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Sylvia Plath, among others. But La Torre Lagares' book is not about poetry alone; it centers primarily on his life under the forces of Hurricane Maria, which made a wasteland of the island, the death of his mother, and his father's betrayal of the family. The lyric cry rises from La Torre Lagares' helplessness, and it is powerful. The poems also speak to the planet's future at this dangerous time.

~Paul Hoover, editor of Postmodern American Poetry

A quarter century of sustained commitment to award-winning literary writing and production with a keen eye for contemporary San Juan emanates from these pages. Here springs the aching beauty of Elidio La Torre Lagares' Puerto Rico, a Latin American Caribbean country mired in colonial debt emerging from a catastrophic climate change hurricane, in a mature voice intimately articulating losses made bearable through forging art, personal and collective disasters on the scale of Eliot's Wasteland illuminated by poetic praxis. Also a paean to formative poets, with echoes of Plath, Stevens, Whitman, Pietri, etc. exceeding the explanatory footnotes, this new addition to La Torre Lagares' oeuvre brings a trans-American arc and modernist vision of debacle to its twenty-first-century incarnation at the center-margin of failed empire. Wonderful wasteland indeed.

~Maritza Stanchich, University of Puerto Rico

In wrought and buoyant lyric... La Torres Lagares etches the deaths of his own mother and father into a personal and collective account of both suffering and resilience in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María. The poet draws to light how the United States scrawls ambiguous borders in its troubling relationship with the world's oldest colony.

~Sasha Pimentel, World Literature Today