{"title":"Martin Espada","description":"MARTÍN ESPADA has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, including Floaters, winner of the National Book Award, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,  and The Republic of Poetry, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.","products":[{"product_id":"imagine-the-angels-of-bread-poems-paperback","title":"Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eCombining the personal with the political in his fifth collection, Martín 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378250678495,"sku":"9780393316865","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/otFzk9BnUK9780393316865.webp?v=1789250864"},{"product_id":"alabanza-new-and-selected-poems-1982-2002-paperback","title":"Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eAlabanza\u003c\/em\u003e 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. \u003cem\u003eAlabanza\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo 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.--\u003cem\u003eBooklist\u003c\/em\u003eNeruda is dead, but if \u003cem\u003eAlabanza\u003c\/em\u003e is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada.--\u003cem\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378272370911,"sku":"9780393326215","price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/NL54z9TP0s9780393326215.webp?v=1789250927"},{"product_id":"jailbreak-of-sparrows-poems-hardcover","title":"Jailbreak of Sparrows: Poems - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn this brilliant new collection of poems, National Book Award winner Martín Espada offers narratives of the forgotten and the unforgettable.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe poems in \u003ci\u003eJailbreak of Sparrows\u003c\/i\u003e reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes monumental: family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada's focus ranges from the bombardment of his family's hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet's adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. We also encounter \"love songs\" to the poet's wife from a series of unexpected voices: a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eJailbreak of Sparrows\u003c\/i\u003e is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. \"\u003ci\u003eLook at this\u003c\/i\u003e was all he said, and all he had to say,\" the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell us: \u003ci\u003eLook.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378500174047,"sku":"9780593537121","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/XJiRB2MKSj9780593537121.webp?v=1789257914"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/martin-espada.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}