Trading Shadows for Sunshine is the second collection of poetry by author and musician Eric Victorino. After gaining a dedicated following from MySpace and his various musical endeavors, Victorino turned more of his efforts to writing, releasing both books independently, packaging and shipping them right from his living room.
So why should you care? Well, Eric Victorino has plenty to talk about. If you’re a fan of his former life singing for the band Strata, Trading Shadows for Sunshine comes up short with stories derived from his touring adventures. But Victorino has an uncanny knack for making the ordinary extraordinary, keeping you distracted with his everyday thoughts and small triumphs, all the while peeling your head back and injecting you with a freshly inspired outlook.
Although the grammar snob in me wanted to blaze a trail across the pages with a red pen, as barely a sentence begins with a capitalized letter, there is no doubt that every word laid down has plenty of thought behind it. Victorino manhandles the art of free verse poetry and reminds the reader why there doesn’t necessarily have to be any specific flow or formula to writing in order to get your point across.
An easy comparison can be drawn to the raw style of the late Charles Bukowski. I’d even like to propose a Victorino-Bukowski drinking game. Guess who wrote the line: “Something in my head / Is taking everything / Making it look and sound / And smell like shit / Before I get to it.” Bukowski? BUZZ! Wrong! This head that Victorino writes about is the very one where you will spend a majority of the book. Pieces like “Me and My Brother at the Playground” showcase Victorino’s inner dialog of his youth. Taking vengeance upon a bully who threw a stick into his brother’s head, Victorino retaliates with “I threw that motherfucker / Straight into the sun.” But he humbly warns the voyeur not to take him too seriously; “The last thing you should do / Is trace my steps. / Because your luck might not hold up / The way mine did / In those tough times.”
The longest entry, a 17-page tragedy entitled “Baby Bird,” depicts the story of Victorino’s altercation with his high school friend, Jack, who he had just saved from asphyxiating from vomit due to an overdose. The story ends with a dead friend and a dead baby, and is one of the most gut-wrenching tales I have ever read. It is so honestly brutal that it seems like such a story could only be a work of fiction, that Victorino is just an interesting storyteller with a fucked up head. I may be correct, but judging from how the book is written mostly from Victorino’s perspective and the fact that he toured around the country for years with his band, it’s not hard to believe that several novels worth of stories may add up. This story alone is worth the price of the book.
The book dances between the triumphant and the tragic. In “Please Keep Loving Me,” Victorino composes a beautiful poem to his wife, chronicling the possible hardships while spending life together whilst remaining loving throughout. “When your eye wanders / More often than it watches over me / And when your body lusts for new adventures… / Please keep loving me.” Touching upon lost love, Victorino spins the story of his large friend Charlie in “Charlie and Marie,” a dead-end love story that ends with a death.
Throughout the pages of Trading Shadows for Sunshine, Victorino treks across love, death, masturbation, religion, suicide, porn, growing old, and a slew of other everyday subjects. For the most part, the stories run just under a page long, making the book an accessible and very quick read for those who may not have the time to dive into War & Peace this semester. Some of the pieces fail to hit upon any grand overall point, but it seems although that may even have been Victorino’s intention. Many seem as if they are free-flow exercises of his daily observations, but they move your brain gears regardless, creating a collection of works that will inspire even non-writers throughout to just grab a pen and begin to make their mark in time.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Eric Victorino’s latest effort is as dire as it is beautiful; violent as it is insightful. Trading Shadows for Sunshine is an invaluable collection of narrative poems from a man who has many more stories to tell than most.
