Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo

2004

First Published

4.30

Average Rating

Martín Espada has been called “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Over the course of seven award winning collections, Espada has attracted an enormous cadre of fans who applaud his condemnation of injustice across the Americas, his poetic sensibility, his sharp humor, and his ear for the interplay of English and Spanish. The publication of Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton) was a landmark event in the career of this beloved poet and an American Library Association Notable Book of 2003. Although his commanding reading style often drives audiences to standing ovations, Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo is Espada’s first-ever audio CD, featuring over 70 minutes of the best poems of his 20-year career. The resulting collection is a long-awaited addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s most important poets and a natural accompaniment to his award-winning selected poems. “Martín Espada wields his poetry like a flint, striking sparks, cutting to the bone. To read this work is to be struck breathless, and, surely, to come away changed.”—Barbara Kingsolver “[He’s] one of a handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence. His ambition and his achievement remind us of Whitman, where it all begins.”—Russell Banks Martín Espada is the recipient of an American Book Award for Imagine the Angels of Bread, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include the PEN/Revson Fellowship and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. A professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Espada averages 40 performances a year across the country.

Avg Rating

4.30

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

48%

4 STARS

35%

3 STARS

17%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Martín Espada

Author · 15 books

Sandra Cisneros says: “Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published thirteen books in all as a poet, essayist, editor and translator. His eighth collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published by Norton in October, 2006. Of this new collection, Samuel Hazo writes: "Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and passionate intelligence." His last book, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (Norton, 2003), received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. He recently received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry on CD, called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). Much of his poetry arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.