The Trouble Ball
In this new 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 torture and execution in Pinochet’s Chile; the city park where the poet clumsily buries the ashes of a friend; the tomb of fugitive slave and abolitionist 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. The poet 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. He urges us to envision justice, to “bury what we call/ the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever.”
Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2012
Massachusetts Book Award, 2012
International Latino Book Award, 2012
“Martín Espada is a resourceful urban seer, alternately humorous, tender, and impassioned, a warrior poet who raises ‘dissidence’ to a level of majestic art. The Trouble Ball delivers, with Espada’s characteristic fire and dexterity, the eloquence, empathy, and probity that have made him an indispensable American poet. The stirring final poem, ‘Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass’ seems destined to become a contemporary classic.” --Cyrus Cassells
“Martín Espada writes of the ‘city hidden from the city,’ the America hidden from America, the history hidden from history. His poems possess a deep outrage at the injustices of the world, and yet they teach us how to survive in that world—with laughter and love, with witness and memory, with wit and cunning. This new collection is large hearted, profound, mournful; it will also make you laugh out loud and raise your spirit. Like Whitman, Espada is essential to understanding who we truly are as a people.” — David Mura
“Martín Espada champions all who struggle to retain their humanity under the crushing weight a corrupt world places upon them. I turn to his work often—both as a writer and as a human being—because in a complex and confusing world, Espada’s fusion of great tenderness and fueled anger offer a necessary clarity. His latest collection, The Trouble Ball, reminds us that history gathers its losses within us and that, rather than allowing it to make of us an ossuary, we can opt instead to invite the dead as mentors and friends into the here and now.” --Brian Turner
“In The Trouble Ball, Martín Espada continues his lyrical, socially restless revolution, once again baring unflinching witness to a world many of us would rather not see so closely. This is poetry as the poets define it--unforgettable, insistent, a masterful mix of infectious music and revelations that change the way we are rooted to the world.” --Patricia Smith
Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2012
Massachusetts Book Award, 2012
International Latino Book Award, 2012
“Martín Espada is a resourceful urban seer, alternately humorous, tender, and impassioned, a warrior poet who raises ‘dissidence’ to a level of majestic art. The Trouble Ball delivers, with Espada’s characteristic fire and dexterity, the eloquence, empathy, and probity that have made him an indispensable American poet. The stirring final poem, ‘Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass’ seems destined to become a contemporary classic.” --Cyrus Cassells
“Martín Espada writes of the ‘city hidden from the city,’ the America hidden from America, the history hidden from history. His poems possess a deep outrage at the injustices of the world, and yet they teach us how to survive in that world—with laughter and love, with witness and memory, with wit and cunning. This new collection is large hearted, profound, mournful; it will also make you laugh out loud and raise your spirit. Like Whitman, Espada is essential to understanding who we truly are as a people.” — David Mura
“Martín Espada champions all who struggle to retain their humanity under the crushing weight a corrupt world places upon them. I turn to his work often—both as a writer and as a human being—because in a complex and confusing world, Espada’s fusion of great tenderness and fueled anger offer a necessary clarity. His latest collection, The Trouble Ball, reminds us that history gathers its losses within us and that, rather than allowing it to make of us an ossuary, we can opt instead to invite the dead as mentors and friends into the here and now.” --Brian Turner
“In The Trouble Ball, Martín Espada continues his lyrical, socially restless revolution, once again baring unflinching witness to a world many of us would rather not see so closely. This is poetry as the poets define it--unforgettable, insistent, a masterful mix of infectious music and revelations that change the way we are rooted to the world.” --Patricia Smith