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Martín Espada
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Martín Espada’s seventh collection of poems, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems
(1982-2002) was published in 2003, received the Paterson Award for
Sustained Literary Achievement, and was named an American Library
Association Notable Book. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. |
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Martín Espada at State of Emergency
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Listen to his reading of "Pastoral of Chile XI" by Raúl Zurita. |
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Participating in the Following Events
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Tuesday, November 8, 2005: 7 p.m.
State of Emergency
Thursday, April 21, 2005: 9-10:30pm
UniVerse: World Literary Voices
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Selected Reading
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From "Poet in a Box":
We have a problem with Brandon,
the assistant warden said.
He's a poet.
At the juvenile detention center
demonic poetry fired Brandon's fist
into the forehead of another inmate.
Metaphor, that cackling spirit, drove him to flip
another boy's cafeteria tray onto the floor.
The staccato chorus rhyming in his head
told him to spit and curse
at enemies bigger by a hundred pounds.
The gnawing in his rib cage was a craving for discipline.
Repeatedly two guards shuffled him
to the cell called the box, solitary confinement,
masonry of silence fingered by hallucinating drifters,
rebels awaiting execution, monks in prayer.
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