The All-Union Day of The Shock Worker

by Edwin Torres

Poetry. Associated with both the spoken word and avant-garde literary communities of New York City, Edwin Torres has carved out an energetic and suggestive space between those worlds, mapping out a prospective direction for American poetry. "Edwin Torres's poetry--full of complex graphic experiments and daring sonic explorations--opens new creative possibilities, simultaneously challenging and delighting our intelligence" --Lorenzo Thomas. "Torres successfully transmits the oral/aural to the page, attending to vocal immediacies that stretch from Dada excess to spoken-word access" --Jena Osman.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Edwin Torres is a former New York State Supreme Court judge and author, who wrote the 1975 novel Carlito's Way. His book was the basis for the 1993 movie of the same name, starring Al Pacino, and for the 1979 book After Hours, the sequel to Carlito's Way.

In 1958, Torres was admitted to the New York State Bar. In 1959, as an assistant district attorney, Torres participated in the prosecution of Sal "the Capeman" Agron. Shortly thereafter he became a criminal defense attorney.

In 1977, Torres was appointed to the New York State Criminal Court. In 1980 he was selected to the State Supreme Court, where he served as a justice in the Twelfth Judicial District in New York City. The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over felony cases, and Torres presided over a number of high-profile murder cases.

He retired from the bench in 2008 and since then has served on the New York State Athletic Commission.

A film adaptation of Q & A was released in 1990, directed by Sidney Lumet, and it starred Nick Nolte and Armand Assante. "After Hours" was filmed in 1993, but used the title Carlito's Way to avoid being confused with Martin Scorsese's 1985 film After Hours.

Reviews

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A challenging read that needs to be engaged in every way possible: read aloud, introspectively absorbed, and examined on the page. The joy in this collection come from the manner in which Torres' line breaks, leaps in logic, and typography unexpectedly bounces from the outer edges of LanguagePo and ends up in the diction of Classic Narrative.