Floaters: Poems

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for PoetryFrom the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.Martn 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 scar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Ro Grande, and allegations posted in the 'Im 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 loveeven in the voice of a cantankerous Galpagos 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 girls gently racist question.Whether celebrating the visionariesthe fallen dreamers, rebels and poetsor condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his fathers Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Mara, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.