The eighth collection by "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" (Sandra Cisneros) was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

In his eighth collection of poems, Martín Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks.