Floaters, you hear echoes of Whitman and Espada’s own unmistakable, bold voice.
Responding to our past presidential administration, this collection tackles the hot-button themes. In addition to being a voice for the voiceless, with booming, resonant, sinewy lines,
Floaters takes on other difficult topics as well. From immigration and racism to love and death, the reader is swept from the wreckage from the Trump years into the speaker’s love poems and elegies.
Along the way, Espada’s lines respond to the callous treatment of immigrants and people of color in a post-fact, pre-empathy era. The title poem, “Floaters,” is a heart-wrenching account of two immigrants who drowned crossing the Rio Grande, only to be dismissed as a liberal stunt. The poem begins with an epigraph from a post on the I m 10-15 Border Patrol Facebook group site that averred, “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS, could this be another edited photo.”