Written between October 2020 and October 2021, this long poem/journal/improvisation records in one long rush a year's worth of observations and events. Torra’s eyes and ears pull in everything about life that comes his way — Covid, a presidential election, teaching, fatherhood, family, food, writing, art, music, the urban environment, dreams, and a growing interest in the Tao. In keeping open to everything, he attunes the reader to the art of living according to the Tao. Time Being II reflects Torra’s compression of a year into a rhythmic distillate.

Praise for Joseph Torra’s previous publications:

“Boston-based Italian-American writer Joseph Torra has consistently, intelligently and eloquently written about those Italian-Americans who have not escaped (or abandoned) their working-class lives, who may still use their ‘hands and heart’ but live on the margins of an Eataly corporate world. His protagonists are not stock exchange presidents or urban restaurateurs, but rather the restaurant waiter or the machinist out-of-work in a digital world. Torra—in fiction such as They Say, What’s So Funny, The Bystander’s Scrapbook, and Call Me Waiter—has for more than twenty years been our Howard Zinn of Italian-American culture. As Torra wrote in his poem ‘May Day’: ‘Forced to work / I brandish my / pen as banner, / garden hoe, / pick and ax!’ Torra asserts a proletarian presence into a world that has long ago declared the death of the worker.”—Dennis Barone

“If words were lug nuts, he’d spin them in ways the guys down at the garage never dreamed of.”  —New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant read.”  —Esquire

“…brings it all back to where it came from.”  —Robert Creeley

“The way Mr. Torra flows from one event to another, to a memory, to an observation is quite an accomplishment... this book is always a joy to read.”   —Hubert Selby Jr.

“[Part of a]n entire prose tradition that includes everyone from Kerouac to Creeley to Melville...”  —Ron Silliman