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.