Cart 0

Martín Espada

“I see the poetic imagination as essential to the political poem. For poetry, truth is necessary but not sufficient. The imagination—that imagined afterlife, that imagined justice—goes to the heart of the poem as vision. William Blake wrote: 'What is now proved was once only imagined.' We must imagine justice, even the impossible, even if this requires leaps that some might call surreal.”

National Book Award for Poetry

Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Academy of American Poets Fellowship

Letras Boricuas Fellowship

 

Read

WATCH

Martín Espada’s Floaters manages to address the concerns of our times through a timeless voice that can be heard above ‘this cacophonous world.’ These poems remind us of the power of observation, of seeing everything—what’s in front of us, what’s behind us both in memory and in heritage, and what we can only imagine—believing all are worthy of song, all are worthy of taking seriously within our song. This is a collection that is vital for our times and will be vital for those in the future, trying to make sense of today.
— National Book Award Citation
You’ll read this powerful National Book Award winner in one sitting because Martín Espada is lyrical yet direct with his elegies of love to those burdened with hate. The collection is titled after a term used by some in the U.S. Border Patrol to refer to migrants who drown trying to cross over the Río Grande. And Espada, with his eloquent, intimate and sometimes even humorous verses, makes sure we never forget the migrants—beaten, incarcerated, killed—no matter how dangerous or scary the memories are.
— NPR Best Books of 2021
Floaters proves [Espada] is the greatest living American poet….Every poem in this book is a call to action, a commitment to change….Espada reminds me to pay attention, to see, to listen, to act, to keep calling out injustice, to continue naming the dead, and to sing from right here, right now.
— Dante Di Stefano, Southern Humanities Review
Vintage Espada—essential, topical, political, irrepressible; in his poems, mercy acquires muscle and close attention confers value—reminding us that protest and praise rise from the same source. Such eloquence in comradeship, elegy and homage to those who lit the path, and, oh, a fresh bounty of love poems, written ‘not in lust but in astonishment.’
— Eleanor Wilner on Floaters
The visionary latest from Espada combines a sharp political awareness with a storyteller’s knack for finding beauty and irony in the current moment... 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.
Publisher's Weekly on Floaters
In the battle against forgetfulness, in the ongoing war against dumb distraction and voluntary blindness, Martín Espada is our subcomandante. With an ear sweetened by long listening to voices most often unheard, he writes poems that resonate like bells forged of bronze and blood.
— Tim Seibles on Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
In The Trouble Ball, Martín Espada continues his lyrical, socially restless revolution, once again bearing unflinching witness to a world many of us would rather not see so closely. This is poetry as the poets define it—unforgettable, insistent, a masterful mix of infectious music and revelations that change the way we are rooted to the world.
— Patricia Smith

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

 

IMAGE GALLERY

Open and right-click to download