City of Coughing and Dead Radiators

Martin Espada writes poetry of advocacy. In this, his fourth collection, Espada's commitment to community is again powerful and overarching. Espada writes the title poem for "the Guatemalan boy, who listens / through the wall / for his father's landlord-defiant staccato, / jolted awake / by flashes of the landlord / floating over the bed, / parade balloon / waving a kitchen knife." Yet these are narrative poems that transcend victimization, that document not only repression, but resistance, that celebrate as well as denounce. Espada's landscapes range from the Brooklyn of his childhood to the Puerto Rico of his paternal forebears, and his tales range from the lunch counter sit-in staged by his father in segregated Texas to the birth of the poet's first child. In the words of Earl Shorris, Martin Espada is "well on his way to becoming the Latino poet of his generation."