Showing results by narrator "Martín Espada" in All Categories

Known as "the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes" ( Booklist), Martin Espada has entranced hundres of audiences across the country, at college campuses, prisons, churches, even a tortilla factory and a boxing gym, but Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo is his first audio collection of poems. Many of these poems arise from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer.

The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows 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.