Alabanza is a twenty-year collection charting the emergence of
Martin Espada as the preeminent Latino lyric voice of his
generation. "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada
praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon":
the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison
inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary
confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own
father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the
back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the
ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in Mexico
welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he
worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the
immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack
on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to
the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the
American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity.
Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of
Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are
forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten
history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of
selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association
Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to
Remember. "To read this work is to be struck breathless, and
surely, to come away changed." Barbara Kingsolver "Martin Espada is
the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd
select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States." Sandra
Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how
powerful a poet Espada is his range, his compassion, his
astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the
lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his
tenderness, his humor. " Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just
clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully
crafted gems." Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that
makes Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet
since Langston Hughes." Booklist "Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza
is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martin Espada."
San Francisco Chronicle"
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