Martín Espada’s latest book of poems is Floaters (W. W. Norton, 2021), a winner of the 2021 National Book Award. His next collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, is forthcoming from Knopf in spring 2025. Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Extinction
Summer 2024
My Beloved the Blasphemer Causes a Scuffle at the Bar
The Kenyon Review · “My Beloved the Blasphemer . . .” by Martín Espada Turners Falls, Massachusetts, January 2019 My beloved stands at the mike in the barroom on 3rd […]
Extinction
Summer 2024
Florencia, Again and Again
The Kenyon Review · “Florencia, Again And Again” by Martín Espada For Steve Stern The singers sang to Florencia Mallón today. The Threshold Singers stood at the bedside in memory […]
Poetry
Winter 1993
Mi Vida
Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1987 The refugee’s run across the desert borderlands carved wings of fright into his forehead, growing more crooked with every eviction notice in this wharf city of the […]
Poetry
Autumn 1991
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators
Chelsea, Massachusetts I cannot evict them from my insomniac nights, tenants in the city of coughing and dead radiators. They bang the radiators like cold hollow marimbas;they cry out to […]