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Poetry Collections
“Martín Espada is a poet of annunciation and denunciation, a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence.” —Ilan Stavans “Martín Espada’s big-hearted poems reconfirm a “Republic of Poetry” that is truly pan-American, drawing on its many traditions and daring to insist upon its dreams of justice and mercy even during the age of perpetual war. His poetry is earned and his gift is generous.” —Sam Hamill “Espada means ‘sword’ in Spanish, and in these new poems Martín Espada wields the sword of his poetry like a veritable Zorro. The ghost of Allende rises, the ‘disappeared’ reappear, and the legacies of Neruda and Creeley say why they are not dead. Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and passionate intelligence.” —Samuel Hazo “What a tender, marvelous collection. First, that broken, glorious journey into the redemptive heart of my Chile, and then, as if that had not been enough, the many gates of epiphanies and sorrows being opened again and again, over and over.” —Ariel Dorfman “The Republic of Poetry is a dreamland, a utopia, a paradise of the imagination, where the local food is salutation and valediction, where the bloodstained plazas speak history, and where the law of the land is empathy. Martín Espada, like his spiritual forebear Pablo Neruda, names us all, in his every hard-fought line, to our citizenship in this nation of the great, indelibly American word.” —Rafael Campo	The Republic of Poetry October, 2006 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. Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Espada traveled to Chile in July 2004 to take part in the commemoration of the Neruda centenary. The heart of the new collection is a cycle of Chile poems. This is a narrative of creation, destruction and redemption: Neruda’s house in Santiago, wrecked by the military during the coup and rehabilitated in a democratic Chile; Joan Jara walking through the stadium where her husband Víctor was executed after singing for his fellow prisoners; the young poets who rent a helicopter and “bomb” the national palace with poetry on bookmarks; the disgraced ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, jeered leaving a used bookstore. The Republic of Poetry is a land where poets return from the dead. Robert Creeley shares a cigarette with Henry David Thoreau; Clemente Soto Vélez visits in a dream and urges a pilgrimage to the caves of Puerto Rico; Julia de Burgos speaks to a man in jail, who paints her face on an envelope. This is a land of miracles, where the God of the Weather-Beaten Face frees Carlos Mejía—an Iraq war veteran turned conscientious objector—from incarceration, and Captain Ahab himself leads a rather demanding poetry workshop in Provincetown.
Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States. —Sandra Cisneros With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Martín Espada is: his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. He commands all the levels of language from the colloquial to the high prophetic tone. He is a master of his craft and he has a great deal to say to us. Here is a major poet whose due is long overdue. —Marge Piercy	Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 April, 2003 W.W. Norton read the title poem Martin Espada wields his poetry like a flint, striking sparks, cutting to the bone. To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed. —Barbara Kingsolver A sword (Espada) going in, deeply inside. —Eduardo Galeano
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (2000)
Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996)
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems (1993)
Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (1990)
Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987)
Essays
Zapata's Disciple (1998)
CDs
Now The Dead Will Dance the Mambo (2004)
Anthologies
Poetry Like Bread (2000)
El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poets (1997)