Jailbreak of Sparrows

In this brilliant new collection of poems, National Book Award winner Martín Espada offers narratives of the forgotten and the unforgettable.

The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes monumental: family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial 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. We also encounter “love songs” to the poet’s wife from a series of unexpected 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'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 has long become a kind of healing ceremony of the ancients. A lyric narrative in his hands has long become a shield against the onslaught of the world's sharper edges. Espada knows that words are never just words—words outlive us, words enter the bodies of others, words are an art of possession and Martín Espada is a brilliant practitioner of this art.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“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 poems not only hold song and wisdom, but they 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. . . . cup them in [your] hands, and see them glow, as I see them now.’ 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, a song of praise in your hands.’ Yes, put this book to your ear and take it in.”
—A. Van Jordan, author of The CineasteMARTÍN ESPADA has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, including Floaters, winner of the National Book Award, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, and The Republic of Poetry, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.