Floaters (National Book Award Winner)

by Martín Espada

Overview

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A Library Journal Best Poetry Book of 2021

From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.

Martín 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 Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río 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 Galápagos 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 María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393541038
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,040,317
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer finalist The Republic of Poetry. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

I Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge 3

Floaters 6

Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence 9

Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet 11

Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second 13

Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor 15

I Now Pronounce You Dead 17

II Asking Questions of the Moon

The Story of How We Came to America 21

Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach 22

The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die 24

Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn 25

The Cannon on the Hood of My Father's Car 26

Asking Questions of the Moon 27

Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua 28

III Love Song of the Kraken

Aubade With Concussion 33

I Would Steal a Car for You 35

That We Will Sing 37

Love Song of the Kraken 38

Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise 39

Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window 41

Insulting the Prince 42

The Assassination of the Landlord's Purple Vintage 1976 Monte Carlo 43

IV Morir Soñando

Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain 47

Be There When They Swarm Me 49

The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees 51

Flan 52

Morir Soñando 54

The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances 57

Letter to My Father 59

Note on the Cover Photograph 63

Notes on the Poems 65

Editorial Reviews

11/16/2020

The visionary latest from Espada (Vivas to Those Who Have Failed) combines a sharp political awareness with a storyteller’s knack for finding beauty and irony in the current moment. Espada writes on an immigrant experience, in which “We smuggle ourselves across a border of a demagogue’s dreams” and “In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.” His poems challenge the idea of an invented immigrant other (“Conquerors sailing the world mistake my body for an island./ They navigate into hurricanes and blame me when the ships vanish”) and reasserts the humanity of the marginalized. In “That We Will Sing,” Espada describes a poetry class in which recovering addicts spontaneously sing a poem to the instructor: “and so their voices became human again,/ not the baying of wolves to be shot on sight by police after sundown,/ but church voices, school voices, voices before the needle flooded/ their bodies and drowned all the songs, all the poems they knew.” Drawing on history, personal experience, and keen observation, this impressive collection is unique for the way it captures the world-weary voice of a poet and political activist who doesn’t simply call for change, but offers a sense of the long, difficult struggle toward justice. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"If Martín Espada’s name weren’t on the book, I would still recognize the poems as his, the stories that so exactly capture the shaping moments of his life and the lives of others, resonant, particular and yet universal, rendered into a lovely, unique lyricism—with a hard-won maturity. The title poem does what Espada is called to do, naming the dead, saving the memory of their lives. This book disturbs in the best way, and still it sings."

Wayne Karlin

"Vintage Espada—essential, topical, political, irrepressible; in his poems, mercy acquires muscle and close attention confers value—reminding us that protest and praise rise from the same source. Such eloquence in comradeship, elegy and homage to those who lit the path, and, oh, a fresh bounty of love poems, written 'not in lust but in astonishment.'"

Eleanor Wilner

"Along with his trademark blend of gravitas, humor and raucous imagination, we get an Espada more vulnerable, a voice more intimate, than any we’ve heard from him before. Martín Espada has long established himself as one of our most prolific and important poets, his body of work a canon unto itself. Floaters is another cannon in that canon."

John Murillo

"Both elegiac and irrepressible, this is an essential read for anyone interested in poetry as a form of protest."

Chicago Review of Books

"In his dynamic new book, Martín Espada is a fierce activist in verse, decrying, with accuracy and urgency, the depravity of inhumane detention and acute bigotry. One of America’s most indelible voices, as always, Espada’s poetry is lionhearted."

Cyrus Cassells

"A work of grace-laden defiance... Espada lands jabs of bright, hard wisdom... The verve and force of this poet's long career [are alive in Floaters]."

Boston Globe - Nina MacLaughlin