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W.W. Norton & Company, 2010
In Martín Espada's latest book of poetry, political activists and everyday heroes are honored with poems that both pay tribute to and examine identity. The poems in the beginning of the book reflect on a Brooklyn childhood of summer camp, baseball games, and tonsillitis, with characters ranging from a Puerto Rican boxing champion, a heroin-peddling ice cream man, and the poet's mother and father. Though autobiographical work provides a frame for the collection, Espada expertly tackles larger issues of immigration and deportation, torture, civil rights, and race from such locations as Ebbets Field; the site of Frederick Douglass's tomb in Rochester, New York; and a swimming pool at the center of an execution in Chile. In "Epiphany," a dedication to a poet jailed during an anti-war protest, Espada writes
Epiphany is a comic book during the war.
A sailor on the convoy from New York to London
brought home bundles of American comics
that you studied like the scrolls of a world beyond
the sun.
These were heroes who would never become a
hand
waving goodbye from a pyramid of bricks.
The pages rolled: Batman. Superman. Whit-man.
Espada's poems are scenic in scope, often using a rhetoric of public address, yet do not forego intimacy. Ilan Stavans writes "Espada is a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence."
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