Reviews of Espada's Works

“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







“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


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