Poems deal with the Latin American experience, city life, immigrants, and Latin American politics

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Espada, Martín

Poetry

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems

Containing a combination of personal and political resources, this collection of poems touches subjects ranging from memories of childhood, followed by experiences at work, to poems that embrace the themes of political persecution and overcoming political hurdles.

United States

In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martin Espada has created a poetic mural. There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen: Poems

An astonishing collection of political poetry at its finest.—The Progressive, Favorite Books of 2003 Alabanza is a twenty-year collection charting the emergence of Martín Espada as the preeminent Latino lyric voice of his generation. "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon": the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in México welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity. Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember. "To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed."—Barbara Kingsolver "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States."—Sandra Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Espada is—his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. "—Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully crafted gems."—Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that makes [Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes."—Booklist "Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada."—San Francisco Chronicle .

Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002

W.W.Norton & Co

The Republic of Poetry: Poems

The heart of this collection is a cycle of Chile poems by "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" (Sandra Cisneros). In his eighth collection of poems, Martin Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks.

W.W.Norton&Company

"[Espada is] a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence." ―Ilan StavansIn this collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, in 1941, where his Puerto Rican father realizes, at the age of eleven, that dark-skinned players are not allowed on the field; the swimming pool for guards and their families at Villa Grimaldi, a center of interrogation, torture, and execution in Pinochet’s Chile; the city park where the poet clumsily buries the ashes of a friend; the tomb of Frederick Douglass, now a place of pilgrimage. Espada also traces the footsteps of his own history, from his brawls in the schoolyard to his days selling encyclopedias door-to-door. He observes the tender gestures of worlds half in shadow, where an “illegal immigrant” gazes at the snapshots of her wedding to a stranger, or a high school wrestler helps to carry an evicted neighbor’s couch back into her apartment. And he urges us to envision justice, to "bury what we call / the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever."

The Trouble Ball: Poems

Award-winning poet Martín Espada gives voice to the spirit of endurance in the face of loss.
In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems

"With this fine new collection," says Library Journal, Martín Espada "joins the top ranks of poets anywhere"; in the words of Earl Shorris, he is "well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation."

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators

Combining the personal with the political in his fifth collection, Martn Espada celebrates the bread of the imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice. The heart of the collection is a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, neighborhood, and work experiences--from bouncer to tenant lawyer. There are moments of revelation and political transcendence here, which culminate in an elegy for the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned for his advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.

"Martín Espada ....forges a new poetic language."―Dennis Loy Johnson, Pittsburgh Tribune In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martín Espada has created a poetic mural. There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Espada, Martín. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Espada, Martín

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Espada, Martín. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems

Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems

A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen: Poems

Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002

The Republic of Poetry: Poems

The Trouble Ball: Poems

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators

Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems

A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen: Poems