Bøker av Martin Espada

In this collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, in 1941, where his Puerto Rican father realizes, at the age of eleven, that dark-skinned players are not allowed on the field; the swimming pool for guards and their families at Villa Grimaldi, a center of interrogation, torture, and execution in Pinochet's Chile; the city park where the poet clumsily buries the ashes of a friend; the tomb of Frederick Douglass, now a place of pilgrimage. Espada also traces the footsteps of his own history, from his brawls in the schoolyard to his days selling encyclopedias door-to-door. He observes the tender gestures of worlds half in shadow, where an "illegal immigrant" gazes at the snapshots of her wedding to a stranger, or a high school wrestler helps to carry an evicted neighbor's couch back into her apartment. And he urges us to envision justice, to "bury what we call / the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever."

Pandemia being a land or planet whose name derives from the word pandemic. This is an anthology of brilliant work by both established and emerging poets from across the English-speaking world, from Australia to India, Europe to North America. With its accounts of life changed utterly, lives abruptly finished, testimonies of the poignancy, the loneliness and sometimes madness of lockdown, this book is an essential statement of record on the dark times we are living through.

[An] important work . . . inspiring its readers to greater human connection and to keep fighting the good fight. The Rumpus"

"Don't let this book pass you by!"-Library Journal

"Martin Espada ....forges a new poetic language."-Dennis Loy Johnson, Pittsburgh Tribune

The eighth collection by "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" (Sandra Cisneros) was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

"An astonishing collection of political poetry at its finest."-The Progressive, Favorite Books of 2004