— Author of Whiskey Tender: A Memoir (2024 National Book Awards Finalist for Nonfiction) | Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program @ the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)

***

"I was stunned by the infusion of history and lineage, joy and disappointment in this lyric collection. Torres López bends quotidian moments through a prism, slowing time in a way that celebrates the wonder of wakeful living. These poems linger long after you put them down."

— Award-winning poet | Author of Koan Khmer: A Novel | Associate professor of English

***

"Reading Julian Esteban Torres López’s Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins is like reading the writings of Russian poet and avant-gardist Daniil Kharms or one of the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. But the poems’ minimalism reminds one of Zen koans: absurd, irrelevant, contradictory, imaginative, fun and beautiful. Ultimately, Torres López captures the beauty of life’s great and small moments in these poems that linger in the reader’s mind long after the book is closed."

— Author of PLACES & NAMES: Poems | Professor of literature @ Dokuz Eylül University

***

"The poems in Julián Esteban Torres López’s Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins crackle with unexpected imagery and keen, almost minute, observations. Daring and risky, they challenge readers to think beyond the norms of language and cultural history, as each is broken down and reinvented. Think of Derrida working toward a written Picasso; think of Magritte confronting Cortes on a Bogotá street corner; think of Mary Magdalene shouting curses from rooftops. These poems resist all expectations in the very best way while retaining some strange—almost lost—Romantic melancholy that one must dig deeply to find. They capture the finest characteristics of Jack Kerouac’s 'Western Haikus' and then transcend them, leaving readers to contemplate a world in which the past (often felt through Torres López’s memory-scape) comes up against the present."

— Award-winning author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family,Meet Me Halfway, and the 2021 Minnesota Book Award Winner What If Fish

***

"Julián Esteban Torres López has given us a small masterpiece of tiny ideas writ large with his collection, Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins. In minute observations about life, the living, the dead, and the mysterious, these poems breathe life into inanimate objects, turn metaphors on their sides, and play games with language. His education and travels are evident behind the stanzas, but don’t overtly lean on any tired clichés. Rhythmic and concise, each line is a surprise and a truth."

— National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, & Fulbright Fellow | Author of Quarantine Highway

***

"The short poems in this collection, Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins, are more like aphorisms than poetry, and the work pushes the bar between a fleeting narrative to a concise generational lesson, a dance between couples, a truth-discovery, something true revealed inside glimpses of still-life. In the same way that store mannequins are sculptures representing a department store's idea of what is a perfect existence. From a line in the text, each poem is a 'memoir, chronicling our most sublime moments.' Each poem seems to be part of a longer narrative, a life story. In the same way mannequins record a glimpse inside a scene, like the man in ill-fitting overalls in the Sears tool department, or the kids in plaid shirts holding algebra books in the back-to-school aisle. And everywhere I look there are relationships, connections and history. A running thread."

— Poet | Educator | YA/MG Author of Gooseberry and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Dear Mothman

***

"Julián Esteban Torres López's Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins is a brilliant collection of vibrant flickering. These poems are clear and wonderful glimpses into a world always lilting into the surreal and the absurd. There are equal parts terror and whimsy in these poems where speakers dress ‘as clowns’ in protest of the government ‘outlawing fun' and a lonely star ‘recognized’ the speaker ‘walking along the spine of a mountain.’ The bodies of Torres López's speakers and characters bloom beyond the physical. Torres López uses the surreal to evoke these body's sensations and memories. In this collection, eyes shake hands, the teeth of revolutionaries are passed around the dinner table, and the reader is always newly enraptured by the turn of the page."

— Creative Director | Editor | Artist | Musician | Author of AT SEA and BURN THE WITCH

***

"To step into the micro poems contained in Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins is to step into otherworldliness itself, where colors have shape, sounds caper around, and moments in time have a distinct flavor. Every word, every line, every deliberate gap on the page is a matryoshka doll that exposes dizzying layers with each uncovering. Here, one can bump into the afternoon on the sidewalk, as if it were a person; 'hues' and 'shades' — 'yellows', 'red', 'alabaster' — hover always at the eye’s periphery; the I shares the space with She, We, They and the myriad of other named people who feel simultaneously fictional, half-true, and fundamentally real; Time, Hope, Truth, the Wind, and the Heart’s quivering 'bare shoulders' come brilliantly alive; the Moon and Shadows’ constant, mesmeric presences attest to this collection’s haunted, melancholy core. Julián Esteban Torres López has created a world where history, erudition, and vulnerability are challenged, where colonialism, veneers, and appetites are sharply scrutinized — and what a world it is."

— Award-winning blogger | Author of Sack Nasty: Prison Poetry, Dinosaur-Hearted, and Flowers and Stars

***

"This collection is a night sky full of fireflies, flirting with a jar, but never trapped. Julián shares fragments just long enough for you to feel like you got close enough to touch. The lights will reach you, though the dark bleeds through, too. The patterns will shift before your eyes. It is a delight."

— Professor Emeritus of English | Author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded | Winner of the 2017 Ben Franklin Award for Poetry

***

"From the first exquisite, short poem, the reader feels the pulse of the poet’s joy. Even when these poems speak of the darkest moments of life, those moments that threaten to stop us with their misery and suffering and sorrow, the reader still feels the miracle of joy this book offers."

— Author of Dominicana Americana

***

“Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins is a looking glass of humanity that rakes at your soul asking for one more tiny bite. These micro-poems fulfill every yearning of simplicity one has."

— Author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time and Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption

***

"Memory is a patchwork of trembling moments. In these poems, through many lands that have been called home, fantasy and regret commingle as the days come and go. Perceptions congeal into dreams. Here, the earth itself, the sun and moon, our machines, our shadows and ghosts, are all alive. Torres López has recorded his meditations, at turns funny and thought-provoking, that lift like 'the exoskeleton of a butterfly / trying to find its way home.'”

— Writer | Professor @ East Tennessee State University

***

"This collection of poems by Julián Esteban Torres López is a discovery of territories, sprawling and intimate. With sensual imagery and evocative language, Torres López takes readers into kitchens, bedrooms, natural landscapes, and cityscapes, places inhabited by love, sorrow, anger and regret, places that allow us a full range of sensory experiences. We smell former lovers, taste pastries, touch fallen leaves, hear revelry, and see colors across the spectrum. Particularly striking are the explorations of darker territories with Torres López giving us cozy tours of pain, despair, and heartbreak. Just as skillfully, he guides us out of intoxicating gloom, sweeping us into rhythmic dances of diverse human experiences, and with surprising partners. In this collection, senses are unleashed, areas are traversed, and hearts are touched. Underneath it all is Torres López’s steady heartbeat."

— Assistant Professor of creative writing at Seattle University | Chief Executive Editor of Big Fiction Magazine | Author of THREE ALARM FIRE

***

"I enjoy any manuscript steeped in history, that wants to create its own mythology, and which can be as self-referential about its characters as it is about its internal structures."