Because of the political realities into which they are born, Latin American poets are inherent activists. To live in countries like El Salvador or Guatemala one must learn to use words like weapons.

American poets, however, have a weaker tradition of social activism. We tend to think of our poets as aesthetes, not warriors. As a result, their skills at affecting change are retarded. When they address us with the unsightly truths of capitalism, their words turn polemical and thicken on the tongue.

For two decades, Martín Espada has been the exception to this rule in American letters. He is not an activist who writes, or a poet who tries to effect change; his qualifications in both fields are legitimate. For years, he worked as a tenant lawyer, defending those on the margins. He has been publishing poetry for more than 20 years.

Espada has been teaching at the University of Amherst for some time now, but he has not given up the fight, as his latest collection, Alabanza, so beautifully shows. Drawing from six previous collections as well as new work, the volume seems like a Third Circuit Court waiting room on a border town. It brings us tales of fruit pickers and city welfare cleaning crews, immigrants caught coming north in boxcars, shivering in the dark.

In the hands of many other poets, there would be a patronizing air to these verses, but Espada has a way of making himself invisible. At its best, his poetry comes off like an act of preservation, a way of getting his readers to look at a busboy's premature crow's feet and understand that they are not laugh lines.

"Tato Hates the Yankees" tells of a young man who "could see the seams/ on the ball/ from four hundred feet," and won a tryout for the New York team. Only the alarm clock didn't work that morning for him, and he lost his chance. Eventually, he takes a night job soaping graffiti off the Holland Tunnel walls.

No wonder he hates the Yankees.

There are dozens of stories like this in Alabanza, as Espada obviously feels solidarity with those who have been steamrolled in America.

Not all poems feature a narrative; in some, an image can suffice. Here is the entirety of The Right Hand of a Mexican Farmworker in Somerset County, Maryland:

A rosary tattoo

between thumb

and forefinger

means that

every handful

of crops and dirt

is a prayer,

means that Christ

had hard hands

too
 

The following poem, The Florida Citrus Growers Association Responds to a Proposed Law Requiring Handwashing Facilities in the Fields, also speaks for itself:

An orange,

squeezed on the hands,

is an adequate substitute

for soap and water
 

Espada is a deft humorist. His line breaks can highlight the inherent unfairness of an industry's statement; an image will uncover the political irony of an image. Coca-Cola and Coco Frio sees the history of Puerto Rico in the fact that islanders there now crave soda, while the milk of their own bounty—coconuts—rots on trees. Another poem snickers at the fact that a Boston-area school named after Teddy Roosevelt, veteran of the Spanish-American War, is now populated by Latino children.

This sense of humor is but one of the grace notes Espada uses to leaven the sorrow so evident in Alabanza, a word the book's glossary tells us means "Praise: sometimes used in a religious sense." Praise is Espada's way of rescuing the downtrodden, forgotten and lovely from oblivion. Occasionally, Espada turns his gift inward, dredging up memories of his own. When his brother went on a crime spree in childhood, the poet recalls wanting to "break this pinata/ painted with a face like mine."

It is a rare moment of violence in a book so filled with anger. More often, Espada uses poetry to thumb his nose at oppression. He turns sad scenarios playful, mundane ones mythic. "The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park" imagines that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda escaped north to watch baseball games when secret police "intended to confiscate his mouth/ and extract the poems one by one like bad teeth." Espada was not yet born yet, but he claims to have been there. Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada.