Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Read online

  Ploughshares: “Of the Threads That Connect the Stars”

  Poetry Salzburg Review: “Mad Love,” “Bills to Pay,” “The Shamrock”

  Policing the Planet (Verso): “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way”

  Post Road: “There But Not There”

  Prairie Schooner: “El Moriviví,” “On the Hovering of Souls and Balloon Animals,” “Hard-Handed Men of Athens”

  The Progressive: “Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio,” “The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch”

  Saudades: Poems by José “Joe” Gouveia (Casa Mariposa Press): “Here I Am”

  The Stinging Fly: “The Man in the Duck Suit”

  Stonecoast Review: “Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio,” “The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate,” “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World”

  Many thanks to the community of poets that supported and inspired this work: Jack Agüeros, Doug Anderson, Chris Brandt, Sarah Browning, Sandra Cisneros, Patrick Cotter, Kwame Dawes, Chard deNiord, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Gouveia, Sam Hamill, Major Jackson, Paul Mariani, Rich Michelson, John Murillo, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Oscar Sarmiento, Lauren Schmidt, Julia Shipley, Gary Soto, Rich Villar and Afaa Weaver.

  Many thanks also to the Poetry Society of America for the 2013 Shelley Memorial Award, and to Andy Shallal for the 2014 Busboys and Poets Award.

  About Martín Espada

  Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His collections of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996) and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993). His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A graduate of Northeastern University Law School and a former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

  ALSO BY MARTÍN ESPADA

  POETRY

  The Meaning of the Shovel

  The Trouble Ball

  Soldados en el Jardín

  La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig

  Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas

  The Republic of Poetry

  Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982–2002)

  A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen

  Imagine the Angels of Bread

  City of Coughing and Dead Radiators

  Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands

  Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction

  The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero

  TRANSLATION

  The Blood That Keeps Singing:

  Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez

  (with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo)

  EDITOR

  His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara

  El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry

  Poetry Like Bread:

  Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press

  ESSAYS

  The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive

  Zapata’s Disciple

  Copyright © 2016 by Martín Espada

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

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  Book design by Lovedog Studio

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  ISBN: 978-0-393-24903-3

  ISBN: 978-0-393-24904-0 (e-book)

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