Jailbreak of Sparrows
In this brilliant new collection of poems, National Book Award winner Martín Espada offers narratives of the forgotten and the unforgettable.
Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anticolonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet’s adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto
Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. There is also a series of “love songs” where the poet speaks in varied voices: a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar.
Jailbreak of Sparrows is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. “Look at this, was all he said, and all he had to say,” the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community, in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell us: Look.
“Martín Espada is a captivating storyteller and memoirist. His great subject is the drama of the Puerto Rican diaspora; his method is meticulously crafted portraiture of lives that intertwine with history, among them his own, radiantly defiant and fearless. One of our
most important contemporary poets.”
--Joyce Carol Oates, author of Butcher
“I want to write like Martín Espada. His poems are flowers for the ‘rabble-rousers and hell-raisers, strikers / and muckrakers, poets and socialists,’ testimonies to his allegiance to those society ignores. He is the poet laureate of the forgotten.”
--Sandra Cisneros, author of Woman Without Shame
“Martín Espada’s beautiful, inconsolable, tender, and unrelenting poems of protest and testimony offer us a landscape where song bears witness and witness becomes a chant, which is to say: a state of being. A lyric narrative in Espada’s hands is a kind of healing ceremony of the ancients, a shield against the onslaught of the world’s sharper edges. Espada is a brilliant practitioner of this art.”
--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
“Martín Espada’s poems not only hold song and wisdom, but also reveal who we are through the narratives he shares from his life. We all would be lucky to have a friend like this, who can tell us both about the struggles of a generation before his own and about how those struggles live within him. And we all are fortunate to have Jailbreak of Sparrows now to walk with us like that friend whose ‘words are always fireflies.’ Whether sharing a tale about his childhood or a memory of his father or a perspective on the love of that which we think is beyond love—the disembodied head in a jar, an atheist marionette, or the unbeliever—Espada’s words pour through these poems with an urgency to tell us, ‘This is a song for you.’ Yes, put this book to your ear and take it in.”
--A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste
“What does history feel like? What process can slowly crack the scrim between the facts and the flesh, the official dates and the lives that moved through them? Only poetry, I thought, as I read Martín Espada’s impressive and necessary new book Jailbreak of
Sparrows, and only this poet, now at the height of his powers, can make this sort of witness. And now the dust we walk on with this unflinching guide has a taste, and its taste, memory rectified, we take in like a healing tonic.”
--Cornelius Eady, author of Brutal Imagination
Review in Counterpunch
Review in The Washington Post
Review in BookPage
Review in North American Review
Review in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Review in Good River Review
Interview in Los Angeles Review of Books
Interview in palabra (National Association of Hispanic Journalists)
Interview in Michigan Quarterly Review (online)
Interview in Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics
“Jailbreak of Sparrows” in LitHub