Mass Humanities is thrilled to sponsor a reading by acclaimed poet Martín Espada, a 2024 recipient of the Governor’s Award in the Humanities. More information will be shared leading up to the event, but for now, enjoy a brief description of the book from the author’s website:
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.
