"Toscano’s WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. demands close reading: each precise phrase, layered reference, and intricate metaphor mobilizes a transhistorical, yet deeply situated, foray into the metapolitics of form (and formal strategies: jokes, jousts, and gestures). Spanning themes from 'Imperium' to 'Humanitas' in his unique demotic style, Toscano's work blends collective action and poetic diplomacy in its critique of national and hemispheric imaginaries, Hispanic representation (past and present), and an emerging new global reset. Wide-ranging, yet pliant and compact, WHITMAN.CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. deftly scales up and scales down the hemispheric rumor mills in the poetry metaverse, offering 'combustions, pipelines, [and] canalizations of fire' that traffic and power the (often disregarded, imperceptible) aesthetic networks which define our contemporary moment."

Jose-Luis Moctezuma, author of "Black Box Syndrome"

"A geo-politic, an untamed poetics of transnational realignment, or an overloaded composter of 'ethno-politico GPS' signals towards a new mytho-poetic of the Americas. Here’s a poetics built out of economic flows, of multilingual contradictions, of neo or just OG-colonial hustles. A new world symphony for our utterly disoriented century, wildly satirical and utterly serious, taking us all down, especially 'us,' the poets, the academics, the 'culture workers,' struggling to keep up with the changing world order. Forget about it! If you thought you knew what poetry 'does,' you were wrong. And now, even better, you still don’t know, because that’s what the prophetic feels like."

Julie Carr, author of "Underscore"

“Toscano counterpoints the narrative of imperial glory so prevalent through the United States, focusing especially on its treatment of the Spanish-speaking populations the settlers found living across that southern stretch. . . . WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. is very much a book about empire, its effects and its counternarratives; of what becomes of those who encounter it, riffing language across a staccato of contemporary and historical references, old gods and gunfire, and whatever peace might be brought through occupation and subjugation. His is a lyric of clipped divinity, unfolding sharp lines and couplets layered upon another, attempting to document and even counterpoint such historic and ongoing violence through a wildly playful gestural patter.”

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