About the Author:
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Sotére Torregian has taught at the Free University of New York, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University, where he helped establish the Afro-American studies program in 1969. Author of the poetry collection, On the Planet Without Visa, he teaches at the University of the Pacific and resides in Stockton, California.
Books Available:
Awards:
- Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry
Praise for Sotére Torregian
“One of our most radically original poets . . . his surreal lyricism, wild sense perceptions, strange imagery, and playful emotional trajectories are unique in contemporary poetry.” —Anne Waldman
“[Torregian’s] poetry often moves at dazzling speed, connecting absurd but astonishingly concrete imagery that challenges a reader’s expectations of the poem. . . . At turns also politically motivated, socially conscious, and mysteriously delighted by the correspondences of history and geography at play in popular culture, Torregian’s poetry charms for its generous, open-armed embrace of seemingly distant associations. . . . He is in the world on his own terms, yet we gain as readers by his perseverance in them.” —Dale Smith
“Sotere Torregian has always given his place of birth as ‘No-Man’s-Land’—a place situated between forces in opposition, where the dialectical imagination is most likely to come alive.” —Andrew Joron
“Located between the force of desire and the antagonistic limits of material conditions, Torregian’s poems are precisely where this imagination throws itself into being, but in published form the poems are only a trace of this becoming. And for anyone that might have the paradoxically frustrating but urgent honor of handling Torregian’s unique manuscripts, all we can hope is that the circulation of their published traces offer a navigable path toward that species of imagination given to accident." —Damn the Caesars
