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Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A Library Journal Best Poetry Book of 2021

From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.

Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.

Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.

The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question.

Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. xi)
• I Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
• Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge(p. 3)
• Floaters(p. 6)
• Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence(p. 9)
• Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet(p. 11)
• Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second(p. 13)
• Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor(p. 15)
• I Now Pronounce You Dead(p. 17)
• II Asking Questions of the Moon
• The Story of How We Came to America(p. 21)
• Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach(p. 22)
• The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die(p. 24)
• Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn(p. 25)
• The Cannon on the Hood of My Father's Car(p. 26)
• Asking Questions of the Moon(p. 27)
• Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua(p. 28)
• III Love Song of the Kraken
• Aubade With Concussion(p. 33)
• I Would Steal a Car for You(p. 35)
• That We Will Sing(p. 37)
• Love Song of the Kraken(p. 38)
• Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise(p. 39)
• Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window(p. 41)
• Insulting the Prince(p. 42)
• The Assassination of the Landlord's Purple Vintage 1976 Monte Carlo(p. 43)
• IV Morir Soñando
• Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain(p. 47)
• Be There When They Swarm Me(p. 49)
• The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees(p. 51)
• Flan(p. 52)
• Morir Soñando(p. 54)
• The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances(p. 57)
• Letter to My Father(p. 59)
• Note on the Cover Photograph(p. 63)
• Notes on the Poems(p. 65)

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Publishers Weekly Review

The visionary latest from Espada (Vivas to Those Who Have Failed) combines a sharp political awareness with a storyteller's knack for finding beauty and irony in the current moment. Espada writes on an immigrant experience, in which "We smuggle ourselves across a border of a demagogue's dreams" and "In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo." His poems challenge the idea of an invented immigrant other ("Conquerors sailing the world mistake my body for an island./ They navigate into hurricanes and blame me when the ships vanish") and reasserts the humanity of the marginalized. In "That We Will Sing," Espada describes a poetry class in which recovering addicts spontaneously sing a poem to the instructor: "and so their voices became human again,/ not the baying of wolves to be shot on sight by police after sundown,/ but church voices, school voices, voices before the needle flooded/ their bodies and drowned all the songs, all the poems they knew." Drawing on history, personal experience, and keen observation, this impressive collection is unique for the way it captures the world-weary voice of a poet and political activist who doesn't simply call for change, but offers a sense of the long, difficult struggle toward justice. (Jan.)

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Martin Espada is the winner of an American Book Award & a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

(Publisher Provided)