'His Hands Were Gentle' brings together, for the first time in both Spanish and English', the best of Victor Jara's lyrics. They reveal Jara as an ardent political poet, and eloquent advocate for the peasantry from which he arose, a socialist visionary and a poetic balladeer of the highest order."

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"

Martin Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Oscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love-even in the voice of a cantankerous Galapagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries-the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets-or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

In this new collection of poems, Martin 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 Khayyam to the death of an "illegal" Mexican immigrant. from "The Trouble Ball" On my father's island, there were hurricanes and tuberculosis, dissidents in jail and baseball. The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King; from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball, The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz, The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coimbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce; Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball."

This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump-about much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes. There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-two poets featured include Juan Felipe Herrera, Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forche, Patricia Smith, Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Elizabeth Alexander, Ocean Vuong, Marge Piercy, Yusef Komunyakaa, Brian Turner, and Naomi Shihab Nye. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or synagogue. They testify to poverty, the waitress surviving on leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act. However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at the airport; another declaims a musical manifesto after the hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a demonstration in the street, an ecstasy of defiance, the joy of resistance. The poets take back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common humanity.

This chapbook collection offers new poems from the prolific career of a community leader, activist, and healer. Luis J. Rodriguez's work asks profound questions of us as readers and fellow humans, such as, ""If society cooperates, can we nurture the full / and healthy development of everyone?"" In his introductory remarks, Martin Espada describes the poet as a man engaged in people and places: ""Luis Rodriguez is a poet of many tongues, befitting a city of many tongues. He speaks English, Spanish, 'Hip Hop,' 'the Blues,' and 'cool jazz.' He speaks in 'mad solos.' He speaks in 'People's Sonnets.' He speaks in the language of protest. He speaks in the language of praise.

In his eighth collection of poems, Martin Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks."

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

Combining the personal with the political in his fifth collection, Martín Espada celebrates the bread of the imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice. The heart of the collection is a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, neighborhood, and work experiences-from bouncer to tenant lawyer. There are moments of revelation and political transcendence here, which culminate in an elegy for the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned for his advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.

"Martín Espada is well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation."—Earl Shorris

Prior praise for Martin 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 Chronicle"

A 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."

Martin 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."

Martin 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.

In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martin 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.

In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martin 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."

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"