Product Description: The poetry of Lauren Schmidt does what poetry should do: make the invisible visible, indelibly, unforgettably. If ever a collection of poems embodied Whitman's dictum to speak for "the rights of them the others are down upon," this is it...read more

Product Description: "[Espada is] a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence."―Ilan Stavans In this new collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: from a pilgrimage to the tomb of Frederick Douglass to an encounter with the swimming pool at a center of torture and execution in Chile, from the adolescent discovery of poet Omar Khayyám to the death of an "illegal" Mexican immigrant...read more

Prior praise for Martín Espada:"Political poetry at its finest…with his soaring lyrics, Espada broadens our appreciation not only of poetry but of resistance itself."---The Progressive "(Espada) writes beautiful poems about terrible realities."---San Francisco ChronicleA volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.This collection of essays on poetry and politics comes from the man the New York Times predicted would become "the Latino poet of his generation" and whom Sandra Cisneros called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors."Martín Espada defends what Walt Whitman called, "the rights of them the others are down upon." He invokes the spirit of poet-advocates such as Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters to explore his own history as a poet and tenant lawyer in Boston's Latino community. He celebrates the poets of Puerto Rico, imprisoned for espousing the cause of independence, and the poets of the Bronx, writing bilingual poems in the voices of the dead.Espada writes of forgotten places and reminds us of the poet's responsibility to remember, as Pablo Neruda remembers the anonymous builders of Machu Picchu or Sterling Brown remembers the slave uprising of Nat Turner. He argues that poets should embrace the role of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator" in their work as writers and in their lives as citizens. He challenges the conventional wisdom that poetry and politics are mutually exclusive, and rejects the poetics of self-marginalization, in keeping with Adrian Mitchell's dictum that, "most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."Martín Espada has published seventeen books as a poet, editor, and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems, received a Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Imagine the Angels of Bread won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Espada is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Offering both a twenty-year retrospective and seventeen new poetic works, this major anthology by the American Book Award-winning Latino poet explores the essence of the American political imaginaton and the resilience of human dignity. Reprint.

Product Description: "Martín Espada ....forges a new poetic language."―Dennis Loy Johnson, Pittsburgh Tribune In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martín Espada has created a poetic mural. There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda...read more

Collects two decades of political verse by thirty poets, including Tomas Borge, Clemente Soto Velez, and Marianne Larson (view table of contents)

Product Description: This is an anthology of work by Latino and Latina poets, which reveals a diversity of form and content. Among the poets are former farm workers and gang members, a physician, a chef and a Vietnam veteran. The variety of experience demonstrates that there is no single Latino/a outlook...read more

A nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the author traces his personal and political development in a series of autobiographical poems, culiminating in an elegy to the Puerto Rican poet and activist Clemente Soto Velez. Reprint. LJ.

Product Description: Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. This volume combines the poems from Espada's critically acclaimed collection of poetry TRUMPETS FROM THE ISLANDS OF THEIR EVICTION with a selection of poems from his first book, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero, which is now out of print...read more

Product Description: "With this fine new collection," says Library Journal, Martín Espada "joins the top ranks of poets anywhere"; in the words of Earl Shorris, he is "well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation." (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Poems deal with the Latin American experience, city life, immigrants, and Latin American politics

Poems in English and Spanish discuss what it means to be Puerto Rican in the United States today