This collection actually consists of three serial poems, extended raps and riffs which Joseph Torra weaves together in terms of themes and images. Torra is a formally innovative writer, whose work Martha Collins calls "quirky, yet always emotionally grounded." Especially resonant is "Paintings," the middle of these serial poems, chock full of lines that speak to the fascination and isolation of modern life: "Abandonment whirls through a room in cold circles. The phone next to a stack of unopened mail has yet to ring." This is good work about these times, well worth your attention.

Keep Watching the Sky

Literature & Fiction

Torra, Joseph

Poetry

Zoland Books

In a stream of consciousness, the narrator recounts his tale of working at the gas station with his father.

Gas Station

United States

Poetry. From one direction Ed Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES FOR JOE, from the other Joseph Torra's THE LETTERS TO ED, with gorgeous collages by Gian Lombardo, these poems literally collide on the page, encounter each other as the authors encounter each other's work and ideas in the poems themselves. Torra's LETTERS is a numbered series of prose poems that infuse daily life with a quiet and questioning desire to know. What were the four virtues of the true woman? What is duality of the text? A secured loan, title to property and large house close to the river reconcile community, family, emotional crisis and writing's role. Why do men do what they do outside the normal spleen? Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES range from lyrical to cynical, from verse to prose, bemused, musing, exploratory. Love/and an outdoor movie in daytime/would be different depending on how powerful/the projector is: either you could only/hear the sound without a picture,/a funny kind of unrelated story booming out,/surround

Watteau Sky: Letters to Ed/Practical Lullabies for Joe

Barrett, Ed

Quale Press

Poetry. The poems in AUGUST LETTER TO MY WIFE AND DAUGHTERS relate to a visit to China in August of 2000. They are simply told in a hypnotic nine-line form: In brush set, jade earrings and bracelet for Molly./ Silk vests for the girls, kids drums, treasure box,rubber/ ball that lights up when it bounces, silk wall hanging ... Joseph Torra's GAS STATION and KEEP WATCHING THE SKY (Zoland) are both available from SPD. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Saddlestapled chapbook.

August Letter To My Wife and Daughters

Pressed Wafer Press

Poetry. Written under the influence of the ancient Chinese poets, the poems in this collection lift off from poems across centuries of writing translated by many hands. Joseph Torra is a novelist, poet and editor whose collections include My Ground Trilogy and Keep Watching the Sky.

After the Chinese

Fiction. CALL ME WAITER is a memoir, with a few liberties taken, of poet and novelist Joseph Torra's twenty years as a waiter and "working the stick" (bartending) in and around Boston. Restaurant work was Torra's night job affording him the time to write his poems (Keeping Watching the Sky, After the Chinese) and his My Ground trilogy of novels. There are no celebrity chefs in Torra's book but plenty of adventures inside the kitchen, out on the restaurant floor and behind the bar. It is a book about one man's world of work. Now Torra can write Call Me Writer.

Call Me Waiter

Contemporary

Fiction. THEY SAY is a novel about a working-class, first-generation Italian family living in the Boston area in the first half of the 20th century, centering on the family's struggles over oldest brother Louie, whose early artistic genius and political passions deteriorate into delusion and severe mental illness. Narrated by various siblings in this sprawling family, their stories have the intimacy and drama of a conversation told around the kitchen table--and like any living, breathing family tale, the brothers' and sisters' stories intersect, run parallel, contradict each other, fill in each other's gaps. Theirs are stories of love and luck, as well as poverty, death, illness, and domestic abuse.

They Say

Fiction. We've forgotten who first said, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Aristophanes may have or some ancient Roman. It's repeated every night in the performances of stand-up comics in clubs across America. The hero of Joseph Torra's new novel WHAT'S SO FUNNY is one of those toilers who is trying to figure out what's so funny and then get us to laugh at it. Torra, a master of the monologue, has never been better.

What's So Funny

Pressed Wafer

Joe Torra’s loosely connected The My Ground Trilogy tells the stories of three working-class, Boston area people—each of whom is trying to crawl out from under. Gas Station is a slice of everyday life that reveals the thoughts of a boy who works more than he plays. Weathering the tedium, frustration and occasional fearsome excitement of events in his immigrant father’s business with a kid’s interest and an adult’s sense of responsibility, the narrator puts the reader in a gritty, greasy garage that somehow relates to everyone’s transition out of childhood. In the second novel, Tony Luongo is a slick-dealing salesman in Pratt’s department store who juggles the effects of his Italian-American upbringing, marriage, parenthood and his own obsessive sexuality with post-war social and political change swirling past him. The endless stream of mental observations brings the reader through territory that is as real and affecting as it is unsettling. In the final installment, My Ground, Torra again explores the working class experience in urban Massachusetts. Forty-year-old Laurel Bell, negotiates through past trauma and present depression to support herself as a poor single woman. Simple, yet vivid detail reveals her mental and emotional process as she constantly tries to reconcile the past and present sufficiently to make sense of her reality. Hubert Selby, Jr said “The story telling has a wonderful sense of imagination, intelligence, economy and originality…” “Torra’s evocation of the… twisted white-trash milieu is brilliantly done, creating an uneasy portrait of life on the fringes of sanity and society,” wrote the London Times and, the New York Times Book Review stated, “If words were lug nuts, Joseph Torra would spin them in ways the guys down at the garage never dreamed of.”

My Ground Trilogy

Let the Bucket Down is an annual magazine of Boston area writing, edited by Joseph Torra. Issue One contains work by or about John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Joe Dunn, Carol Weston, Fanny Howe, William Corbett, Daniel Bouchard, Gerrit Lansing, Ruth Lepson, Robert Creeley and Steve Lacy, Ed Barrett, Margo Lockwood, Amanda Cook, Joel Sloman and more.

Let the Bucket Down: A Magazine of Boston Area Writing

Let the Bucket Down

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Torra, Joseph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Torra, Joseph