The Trouble Ball Hardcover by Martin Espada

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2011-04-05)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 80 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780393080032
• Item Weight: 254.02 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

"[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 the Author

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer finalist The Republic of Poetry. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.