A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen: Poems - Softcover

Espada, Martín

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321681 ISBN 13: 9780393321685

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"Martín Espada ....forges a new poetic language."―Dennis Loy Johnson, Pittsburgh Tribune

In his sixth collection, American Book Award winner Martín 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Martín Espada is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry and, most recently, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

From Publishers Weekly:

Espada, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's various news programs, can keep his magic-inflected tone light even when engaging social disparity: "As I was about/ to put a quarter/ in the parking meter,/ a man walking by/ stopped, whirled,/ fired three karate kicks/ decapitating the meter,/ and stretched out/ his hand/ for the quarter." A former tenant lawyer, Espada makes a convincing Robin Hood both in the poem cursing a "Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts Where My Cousin Esteban Was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks" and in "The Governor of Puerto Rico Reveals at His Inaugural That He Is the Reincarnation of Ponce de Leon." While these poems make a scene defying their overly deterministic titles, it's the quiet and quick ones that make his sixth collection solid, like the title poem, about a man on a fire escape who stops to smoke a cigarette, or "The Mexican Cabdriver's Poem for His Wife, Who Has Left Him", in which the speaker, having challenged the poets in his cab to write the poem at hand, supplies the somehow heartbreaking information that his wife isn't like the moon but "is like the bridge/ when there is so much traffic/ I have time/ to watch the boats/ on the river." The book ends with a suite of unsatisfying poems about the executions of American political prisoners, but the overall effect of this book is one of poetic uplift in the face of everyday oppression. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321681
• ISBN 13: 9780393321685
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88