Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo

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.