Jailbreak of Sparrows
Read by
Martín Espada
Release:
04/01/2025
Runtime:
2h 56m
Quantity:
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
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.
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.
Release:
2025-04-01
Runtime:
2h 56m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9798217066117
Praise