In this powerful new collection of poems, Martin Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. El Morivivi uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands. Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World urges us to melt the bullets into bells. Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean actor, finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s numberless unknown heroes.