In his first collection of essays, award-winning poet Martín Espada turns his fierce critical eye toward a broad range of urgent political and cultural issues. With the same insight and integrity displayed in his poetry, he chronicles many struggles of the Latino community: the myths and realities of machismo, the backlash against Latino immigrants and the Spanish language, the borders of racism, and U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.
Espada's poetry has survived everything from censorship by National Public Radio to a bomb threat at a reading. In his essay "All Things Censored," he describes how NPR commissioned him to write a poem, then refused to air the work because of its political content: a defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the African-American journalist on death row. In "The Poetics of Commerce," Espada takes on the Nike corporation, which solicited a poem for use in a television commercial as part of the company's ongoing propaganda campaign to divert attention from its dismal human rights record in Asian sweatshops.
Espada stirs together ingredients of memoir and reclaimed history in "Postcard from the Empire of Queen Ixolib," which recalls his pilgrimage to the town in Mississippi where his father was jailed half a century ago for not moving to the back of the bus. He also pays homage to "Poets of the Political Imagination"--a force throughout the Americas rooted in the traditions of Neruda and Whitman--and reflects on the political imagination as a catalyst in the creation of his own poetry.
A dozen of Espada's poems, old and new, weave themselves through the essays in Zapata's Disciple. In a voice charged with anger, humor, and compassion, Espada unleashes his words--following Walt Whitman's dictum on what poets should do--"to cheer up slaves and horrify despots."
Martn Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He has published five books of poetry, most recently City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (W.W. Norton, 1993) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (W.W. Norton, 1996), which won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Another volume, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone, 1990), won both the PEN/Revson Fellowship and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. He is also the editor of Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry(University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Espada is currently a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
