Martín Espada

Biography

Martín Espada’s latest book of poems is Floaters (Norton, 2021), winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other collections of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (Norton, 2016), The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), and Alabanza (Norton, 2003). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. (Photo: Lauren Marie Schmidt)

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2023

Isabela’s Red Dress Flutters Away

By Martín Espada
POETRY / Fall 2023

The Iguanas Skitter Through the Cemetery by the Sea

By Martín Espada
POETRY / Winter 2022

Award Ceremony Nightmare With Swedish Meatballs

By Martín Espada

I was sitting at a banquet table before the awards ceremony. 
A distinguished character actor, who narrated the PBS documentary
I saw last night, entered the banquet hall in a white jacket.

POETRY / Winter 2022

Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar

By Martín Espada

Like the pirates and revolutionaries of legend, heads spiked
atop the great bridge spanning the great city, I am now a head
without a body. Maybe the body ran away while I was sleeping,
slamming headless into walls and doors. Maybe my body...

POETRY / Winter 2022

Big Bird Died for Your Sins

By Martín Espada

Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots
over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird
for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all

POETRY / Winter 2022

Look at This

By Martín Espada

My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through
an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us,
a man with white hair and a white beard reached into a dumpster,
plucked out a bag of potato chips...