Offering a comprehensive collection of Puerto Rican poetry in English, this text includes the work of 64 poets, as well as selections from Puerto Rico's tradition of popular verse forms - coplas, decimas, bombas - produced by anonymous writers.

"A collection of poems in a new street-born language, Nuyorican; a dynamic English-Spanish contrapunctal expression of the anger and aspirations of the Puerto Rican. English nouns function as verbs. Spanish verbs function as adjectives. Raw life needs raw verbs and nouns to express the action and to name the quality of the experience."--Jacket.

A collection of stream-of-consciousness jottings by a Puerto Rican woman on life in New York City. A portrait of the city by a writer with an acute sense of observation. The author teaches Spanish at a university.

Poetry. Latin American Studies. Jack Agueros is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer born in East Harlem who has remained closely involved with New York's Puerto Rican community. Agueros' varied writing career has reached from TV's Sesame Street to experimental Off-Off Broadway drama. His translations have been performed at the New York Public Theater and his poems and stories have appeared in Nuestro, Revista Chicana-Riquena, Hanging Loose, The Portable Lower East Side, and many other publications. His first collection of poetry, CORRESPONDING BETWEEN THE STONEHAULERS, was published by Hanging Loose in 1991 followed by his first collection of short fiction, DOMINOES & OTHER STORIES FROM THE PUERTO RICAN published by Curbstone Press.

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love. Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I’m 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love—even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl’s gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries—the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets—or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father’s Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.