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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."

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. 13)
• Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
• Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
• I The Red Flag(p. 19)
• II The River Floods the Avenue(p. 20)
• III The Insects in the Soup(p. 21)
• IV The Little Agitator(p. 22)
• V Vivas to Those Who Have Failed(p. 23)
• Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World
• The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate(p. 27)
• Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World(p. 29)
• How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way(p. 31)
• Chalkboard on the Wall of a Diner in Providence, Rhode Island the Morning After George Zimmerman Was Acquitted in the Shooting Death of Trayvon Martin, an Unarmed Black Teenager(p. 33)
• Ghazal for a Tall Boy from New Hampshire(p. 34)
• Here I Am
• Here I Am(p. 39)
• Barbaric Yawp Big Noise Blues(p. 41)
• Once Thundering Penguin Herds Darkened the Prairie(p. 43)
• Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio(p. 45)
• The Socialist in the Crowd(p. 47)
• From the Rubáiyát of Fenway Park(p. 49)
• Hard-Handed Men of Athens(p. 50)
• Marshmallow Rice Krispie Treat Machu Picchu(p. 53)
• The Man in the Duck Suit(p. 56)
• A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body
• Flowers and Bullets(p. 59)
• A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body(p. 60)
• The Discovery of Archaeopteryx(p. 62)
• Of the Threads That Connect the Stars(p. 64)
• The Goddamned Crucifix(p. 65)
• El Moriviví
• Haunt Me(p. 69)
• The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch(p. 71)
• On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals(p. 72)
• Bills to Pay(p. 74)
• After the Goose That Rose Like the God of Geese(p. 75)
• Mad Lave(p. 76)
• The Sinking of the San Jacinto(p. 78)
• There But Not There(p. 80)
• The Shamrock(p. 82)
• El Moriviví(p. 84)
• Notes on the Poems(p. 88)

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Booklist Review

This latest collection from accomplished poet, essayist, and editor Espada (The Trouble Ball, 2011) takes its title from a line by Walt Whitman and opens with a sonnet of the same name about the Paterson Silk Strike, an industrial work stoppage in New Jersey at the turn of the twentieth century. Espada deploys indelible images and remarkable cadence to tell the story: a bullet fired to scatter / the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino's back. While the strike ultimately failed, it was not in vain, as Espada points out in the poem's closing lines, for the labor agitators' children became doctors, and their grandchildren became poets. This remembrance of origin and appreciation for working-class underdogs informs this smart, tender collection that meditates on a broad range of current American issues, from Trayvon Martin's murder to the mass shooting in Sandy Hook to the execution of journalist Jim Foley by ISIS. Espada's long lines and somber tone often break into humor and street slang, creating an invigorating balance between lyrical reflection and historical exploration.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist

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.

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