Floaters: Poems

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Methodical police work, exposure to the seedier side of humanity, wrapped around the America Cup race in San Diego in 1995. Yet, in poetry class today, you gave the addicts a poem and they sang the poem back to you, Lift Every Voice and Sing, and so they did, even the man with one arm, and so their voices became human again, not the baying of wolves to be shot on sight by police after sundown, but church voices, school voices, voices before the needle flooded their bodies and drowned all the songs, all the poems they knew. The title poem ‘Floaters’ is the story of the death of 25-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-months-old daughter Angie Valéria Martínez Ávalos. Vintage Espada―essential, topical, political, irrepressible; in his poems, mercy acquires muscle and close attention confers value―reminding us that protest and praise rise from the same source.

Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, had migrated from El Salvador and planned to seek political asylum in the U.

It's the outstanding body and jaunty smile--full of mischief, full of hell--of one cuppie, a particularly fiery redhead named Blaze, that gets Leeds and Fortney's attention.

Martinez' wife, Tania told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current.

I think the beginning and ending poems were the strongest and most searing while the poems written in memorial in the middle section were ones that I just didn't love as much. Focusing on social justice, immigrants, and Puerto Rican history, Brooklyn born Espada has written something so smart and poignant that I know I will be revisiting often and recommending to many.I wasn’t moved by the poems, and there was no sentimentality, no brush of the human that moves me when trying to read activist poetry. Perhaps I am too-biased in coming into poetry and art with the idea that it will provide an aesthetic experience, which in a way can't be too-much based on what we perceive to be reality. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Indeed, Blaze will soon lead Detective Anne Zorn and Mick Fortney along a bizarre criminal trail that would behilarious if it didn't wind up just as nasty as it gets, with a pair of murders right on the eve of the biggest sailing race of all.

The title poem is brilliant, but there are many others to look at if you're frazing: Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge; Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence; Boxer Wears American 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second; Death Rides the Elevator in the Bronx; and "The Assassination of the Landlord's Purple Vintage. 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. Explosively political and deeply intimate, Floaters is a beautiful and powerful collection of poems that stretch across lives and history while also speaking directly to the time we live in today.The title poem draws on a tragedy: the deaths of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 25, and his young daughter, Angie Valeria, whose bodies were found in the water along the Rio Grande. Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English, word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp. If Martín Espada’s name weren’t on the book, I would still recognize the poems as his, the stories that so exactly capture the shaping moments of his life and the lives of others, resonant, particular and yet universal, rendered into a lovely, unique lyricism—with a hard-won maturity. However, the condition is rare and only affects 1 in 10,000 people, although it can be more common in people who have myopia (short-sightedness).