Explosion Rocks Springfield is eighty one-page iterations of the following line: The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.
Each iteration consists of analytical-philosophic queries, lyrical diffractions, and paranarrative documentary. Sixteen sub-topic variations appear. Every single word of the primary thematic line is exfoliated, extended, and exploded, multiplied, in a fugal structure, seeking the effects of content density, tension, and return. Continual re-figuration of all themata invites the reader to experience a pleasurable engagement with a material transparency that is neither prepackaged ("found") nor fancied from thin air ("inspired").
What is explosion to a slab of drywall? What is "drywall" exactly? HEIGH-HO! Why do people strip? What is "day care"? Why "day"? What is night care? Why daylight why daylight why daylight. What is "care" exactly? Gas. Wherefrom gas? 
Raised in southern California, experimental poet, playwright, and labor activist Rodrigo Toscano is the author of seven collections of poetry including Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and Deck of Deeds (2012). His work has been widely translated and anthologized; his radio pieces have aired on stations across the country. Toscano works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers and the National Institute for Environmental Health Science. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Explosion Rocks Springfield

Business & Money

Toscano, Rodrigo

Economics

Fence Books

In this, his first full collection of poetry, Rodrigo Toscano explores "how things wouldn't happen." The Disparities brings together official and unofficial histories that view one another to expose new meanings that are created between "the gaps." Time, in this highly original work of poetry, is "unwound," revealing new significance for the things of the world.Rodrigo Toscano's poetry has published previously in numerous journals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Disparities (New American Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Sun Moon Pr

Poetry. Rodrigo Toscano's PLATFORM is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. The work is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and "unfuckingrightgaggable," PLATFORM is a victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity. Toscano is a nationally influential writer, whose work along the intersections of social and aesthetic activism is adding new dimensions to contemporary poetics. His other two books are THE DISPARITIES and PARTISANS (both available from SPD).

Platform

Contemporary

Atelos

In this, his first full collection of poetry, Rodrigo Toscano explores "how things wouldn’t happen." The Disparities brings together official and unofficial histories that view one another to expose new meanings that are created between, what Toscano calls, "the gaps." Time, in this highly original work of poetry, is "unwound," revealing new significance for all the things of the world.Rodrigo Toscano’s poetry has been published previously in numerous journals, where he has garnered a large audience. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Disparities (Green Integer)

Green Integer

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. DECK OF DEEDS is comprised of seventy poetic prose image captions (sans images) whose titles are inspired by the popular Latin American loteria card game. Written by a poet who logs in an average of ten thousand miles of air travel each month working as a union trainer and coordinator throughout the U.S., the "cards" reflect a dizzying array of cultural-geographic locations, each one acting as a scene-setter for highly dystopian portraits of "people" caught in a tangle of industry-specific "predicaments."

Deck of Deeds

Counterpath Press

Poetry. The Global and National Golems of Meaning Mirages are kept at bay in Rodrigo Toscano's IN RANGE. Or are they? 80 poems (written in 30 days), these works seek faint signals of life through the noise of it all. Toscano lasers in on domestic to-do's in order to confront basic questions of personal and social perseverance. At times, dark and troubled, at others, bewildered and hilarious, IN RANGE is positively hellbent on crashing the Party of Big Meaning. Piecemeal Meaning is what?s actually had. It adds up!

In Range

Counterpath Pr

THE CUT POINT is a collection of ethically hybrid responses to the current social-political climate in the U.S. from the perspective of a New Orleans poet who is a labor and environmental strategist. By way of formal structures such as sonnets to highly experimental forms, this newest collection of Toscano's poetry (his tenth) surveys the relentless warping of civic life. Employing analytic poetic rigor, humor, and strong doses of the bathetic, Toscano pushes back on apocalypticisms to imagine forms of agency that might carry us through these rocky straights. Poetry. Environmental Studies.

The Cut Point

"[This] collection of . . . multi-disciplinary adventures induces territories of dissent and identity, both of and beyond the stage. . . . [Rodrigo] Toscano has produced an often gleeful romp wherein the geometry of the self affirms/celebrates its style while steadfastly subverting institutionalized forms."—Sustainable Aircraft

Collapsible Poetics Theater

In Rodrigo Toscano’s The Charm and The Dread, the unraveling of the American Imperium is rendered frontally, through strange adjacencies. Always an astute observer of tectonic shifts in political culture, Toscano plumbs the inter-locking crises that have kicked us into these 2020’s. From formal sonnets to high-speed screeds unspooling syntax, uncanny portraiture to earnest inquiry and appeal to specks of emergent new moralities, Toscano’s ninth collection is a guidestar for our time. The Charm and The Dread jostles political and aesthetic complacency, and invigorates us toward a viable baseline attitude for the new decade. A somatized, personified trajectory as synaesthetically rich as that of tarot or any other hallowed divinatory tool of the ages, The Charm and the Dread brings a naturalized, dreaming body into an awake state in the traumascope of virtualized pandemic humanscape, the place in which we can again breathe, and speak. In these poems we find that the pandemic is “an interiority in search of an externality.” Speaking and breathing these rhapsodic scripts of good-humored yet uncompromised, felt-and-seen engagement of our complete catastrophe, we move from “The crimson yellow of no past // The charcoal pink of no future” through “the squander of recourses // Of leadership” into real encounters with Justice, Revolution, and Flesh. Prescient and unafraid to look, Rodrigo Toscano asks, “What’s the use of any [insurrection] today //If tomorrow and many days to come // Aren’t shaped differently, aren’t lived differently”?

The Charm and the Dread

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Books by Toscano, Rodrigo