Floaters
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
