Patient Zero

by Tomás Q. Morín

This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices—of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2017

About the author

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the collection of poems Machete and the forthcoming memoir Let Me Count the Ways, as well as the poetry collections Patient Zero and A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Reviews

[Arielle Hebert]

The poems in Patient Zero have the ability to transport. Each destination is alive with description and a bit of Morín's bend toward magic. Human and animal--or bird--blur together in moments of heightened emotion, bringing the wild into the domestic interior. There are beautiful homages in the collection, for a range of greats like Ai, Son House, and Pablo Neruda.
Some personal favorite poems in this collection include "Saudades," "Carità Americana," "For My Daughter," and "Stargazing."

[Lauren]

Unfortunately this one never connected for me.

[Ben]

A fine book of poetry, mostly centered on the end of love. Like Jay-Z, I have all manner of worries and heartbreaks, but falling out of love isn't one of them, and was not quite the target audience.

What a blessing then, to not connect with the message. I heartily recommend this to those that would.

[Bruce Wasserman]

Tomás Morín is a writer who understands time. He parcels it, plays with it, takes it down to its microscopic focus, reassembles it and his work sings to it in a way that is distinguished, telling, unique. Because of his penchant for the tiniest details in the editing of his poetry, Morín may spend months on each poem. By the time his poems have collected themselves into a work, that work is something of substance.

For proof of Morín’s expertise in editing, one need not look further than his translation of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. That translation will, no doubt, became a hallmark for anyone studying Neruda’s work. So it is not surprising, upon cracking the covers of Morín’s latest book Patient Zero, to find the same detailed aesthetic applied to his own poems, that same microscopic editing of his poetics that elevates each poem found within the collection to a position of mastery... Red the rest of this review that I wrote for the New York Journal of Books, on their website: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...

[John Madera]

Christ, Garbo, Rimbaud, Son House, Adam and Eve, Neruda, Odysseus, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Cleopatra, Goethe, Frost, Dickinson, Sagan, Stravinsky, and Blind Willie Johnson are among the ghosts you’ll encounter in Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero. Like the indomitable structure in “Sing Sing” here, these poems float in and through the porous interstices of past and present, have “a way / of making the mind // forget what was real.” Poem after crystalline poem, Morín interrogates what and how we remember and what we talk about when we talk about loss and love and life, about language and death and “the nature of things.”

[Kaitlin]

This book buzzes with energy and life - the language pulls on the tongue and mind in a way that is at once pleasurable and provocative. I wish I could quote every line of this book before bed at night like a prayer or a missive into the universe that would find its way to those who need to hear language at its most beautiful, most beloved. Here, for example: "No, I only have to wander into any market, spread my arms, and wait for the crowd to blow me so many kisses with every r and l and w they speak that I look like a tree made of butterflies at the far end of a small and bustling road I have come to call my life." This is a must read.

[Daniel Hagedorn]

I can't remember when I picked this volume up. Certainly, the name makes you think of a pandemic, but it's not that at all. Some pieces I really liked, inventive, playful pieces full of a love of language and life. Saudades. The word means so much even though there is no translation. I like the way it sounds. Sometimes it is a bit of work to get through a volume of poetry. This is not one of those.

[Jon Nakapalau]

The transitory nature of day to day existence is examined in this book of poems. Questions of desire and acceptance of what will be are looked at from a perspective that is shifting in time; time that we can't control - time that is controlling us. This adds to the urgency of the time we have in the here and now; trying to navigate our days as best we can.

[Jesse Hassinger]

While “Sing Sing” may steal the show, the majority of these poems are stellar ruminations on human-ness and the hope for more.

[Tracey]

This one didn’t hit as hard for me as Machete did… idk maybe poetry isn’t my thing, but imma keep testing the waters with it!

[Donald Quist]

Each of Morin's masterful, compassionate, poems provides readers a starting point for further conversation and deeper personal reflection long after the book is finished. Thematic and layered, this is the best kind of poetry, the kind that invites us to discover something new on each reading.

[Kerry Pickens]

This is a book of pretty good poetry, but I didn't realize it was poetry when I ordered it.