UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry

Book Jacket: El Coro, edited by M. Espada

Edited by Martín Espada

Winner, Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

A rich collection of poetry celebrates the experience of contemporary Latinos and Latinas

This is an anthology of compelling new work by more than forty Latino and Latina poets, including Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Luis Rodríguez, Rosario Ferré, Victor Hernández Cruz, Gary Soto, and Clemente Soto Vélez. El Coro offers proof that Latino/a poetry today is more complex and diverse, more beautiful and powerful, than has been previously acknowledged.

Here we find the open expression of anger and grief, self-mocking humor, the music of protest, the quiet assertion of dignity, and the raucous celebration of survival. There are poems about stoop labor and welfare offices and housing projects, but also poems about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Minotaur.

Among the poets are former farm workers and gang members, a practicing physician, an ex-tenant lawyer, a professional chef, and a Vietnam veteran. One poet was a political prisoner for six years; another staged a famous hunger strike; still another was indicted for her work with Central American refugees. In many ways this collection of poets comprises a chorus. Their song humanizes in the face of dehumanization.

"The widest window on some of the liveliest poetry being written in this country today. Martín Espada has chosen not just poets but individual poems that prove there is no such thing as a single Latino/a manner or outlook—poems that delight and bite and exhilarate from start to finish."

Paul Jenkins, Editor, The Massachusetts Review

Martín Espada has published five books of poetry, most recently Imagine the Angels of Bread, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also editor of the anthology Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination. Espada is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Poetry / Ethnic Studies
184 pp.
LC 97-22019
$30.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-110-4
$21.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-111-2
1997
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Published in cooperation with The Massachusetts Review

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