The Trouble Ball: Poems - Hardcover

Espada, Martín

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039308003X ISBN 13: 9780393080032

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

"[Espada is] a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence." ―Ilan Stavans

In this collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, in 1941, where his Puerto Rican father realizes, at the age of eleven, that dark-skinned players are not allowed on the field; the swimming pool for guards and their families at Villa Grimaldi, a center of interrogation, torture, and execution in Pinochet’s Chile; the city park where the poet clumsily buries the ashes of a friend; the tomb of Frederick Douglass, now a place of pilgrimage. Espada also traces the footsteps of his own history, from his brawls in the schoolyard to his days selling encyclopedias door-to-door. He observes the tender gestures of worlds half in shadow, where an “illegal immigrant” gazes at the snapshots of her wedding to a stranger, or a high school wrestler helps to carry an evicted neighbor’s couch back into her apartment. And he urges us to envision justice, to "bury what we call / the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever."

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.

Review:

“Martín Espada is a resourceful urban seer, alternately humorous, tender, and impassioned, a warrior poet who raises ‘dissidence’ to a level of majestic art. The Trouble Ball delivers, with Espada’s characteristic fire and dexterity, the eloquence, empathy, and probity that have made him an indispensable American poet. The stirring final poem, ‘Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass,’ seems destined to become a contemporary classic.”
- Cyrus Cassells

“The Trouble Ball is large-hearted, profound, mournful; it will also make you laugh out loud and raise your spirit. Like Whitman, Espada is essential to understanding who we truly are as a people.”
- David Mura

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 039308003X
• ISBN 13: 9780393080032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 66