Review by Mike Sonksen Poet and professor Martin Espada’s latest book, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed , takes its title from a line in a Walt Whitman poem. Published by Norton, the 34 poems in this collection carry on the Whitmanian tradition of paying tribute to the everyday American and those who are usually in the shadows. Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his register deftly oscillates between calls for social justice, cataloging 21st Century America and coping with the death of his father. Divided into five sections, the book is dominated by elegies, transcendent images and subtle humor simultaneously. The titles of the five sections also reveal his poetic aims: Part 1 is “Vivas to Those Who have Failed”; Part 2 is “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World”; Part 3 is “Here I Am”; Part 4 is “A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body”; and Part 5, “El Moriviví.” Part 5 is the cycle of poems dedicated to his father. The titles of the poems themselves...