Martín Espada

"From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief, and love. In this collection, Martín Espada bears witness to confrontation with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents playing soccer in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He knows that times of hate also call for poems of love-even in the voice of a Galápagos...

"The heart of this collection is a cycle of Chile poems by the poet Sandra Cisneros called 'the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.' In his eighth collection of poems, Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. This book 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"--

Espada's poems range from his childhood in Brooklyn to Puerto Rico and the struggle of Latinos in the United States.

A look at social change throughout history, as seen through the music, poetry, speeches, and manifestos of rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past - and present - including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Chief Joseph, Muhammad Ali, along with unknown veterans, union workers, abolitionists, and many others never featured in high school textbooks. Celebrates the extraordinary possibilities for creating social...