There’s Always Another Story to Tell

Annelies Zijderveld inteviews Martín Espada about his new collection of poems, “Jailbreak of Sparrows.”

By Annelies ZijderveldAugust 11, 2025

• Poetry

TAKE THE PARK STREET Bridge from Oakland to Alameda, and before you hit the beach, you’ll see a small channel and the postage stamp–sized Scout Park. You could blink and miss the green bench and the dregs of a memorial dedicated to Mario Gonzalez Arenales, whose wrongful death by police made national headlines in 2021. I drove to find that bench. You must squint to see the fading chalk outline on the sidewalk that says “Remember Mario.”

Remember. Martín Espada bears witness for the Puerto Rican diaspora as well as for other people who might be otherwise overlooked. In his newest collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025), we encounter a community college student, Ralphie, struggling with more than coming to class, and a janitor who was a refugee from Pinochet’s Chile—then there is Roberta, recently out of the asylum, where no one believed she had once been a nurse. William Carlos Williams makes an appearance, and Puerto Rican luminaries like Hiram Bithorn do too. The cast resembles a scrapbook of disparate characters who may never have met otherwise.

There is much humanity in Espada’s work. In “Your Card Is the King of Rats,” he writes about working in legal aid and how the “refugees from the land of death squads waited for us.” Love poems come tinged with humor, written from unexpected viewpoints: a disembodied head, a one-eyed fish, a plate of plátanos maduros. I can’t shake the poem written to the city of El Paso, Texas, set in the aisles of Walmart, where a white supremacist killed 23 and injured 22, most of them Latinos, in a 2019 mass shooting. Then, there’s the poem for Mario Gonzalez Arenales, “Wake Up, Mario.” Leave it to the son of a photographer, community leader, and migrant to learn at an early age how to see people and render them and their stories for the page.

The poetry of Martín Espada is legion. The National Book Award–winning author of Floaters (2021) has penned over 20 books. Espada and I spoke over Zoom about the role of research in writing poetry, the criteria for when a story might translate into a poem, and a prescient question that resounds in today’s political climate.

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ANNELIES ZIJDERVELD: Immigration, wrongful deaths, an ironic poem read at political rallies in “The Snake”—you don’t balk at taking on difficult topics even when they’re difficult to look at. Why is that? What do you see as your job as a poet?

MARTÍN ESPADA: I write about difficult subjects. I am of the belief that that’s especially necessary in difficult times. Look at it as a matter of language. Look at the language of the powerful. The language of power tends to divorce words from meaning. This language intends to control rather than communicate, to obscure rather than clarify. The language of power drains the blood from words. My job as a poet is to reconcile language with meaning, to put the blood back into the words. I tell these stories most of us would call “difficult.” Yet I’m trying to distill the essence of the humanity in those narratives, so that the difficulty fades away and we see the people in these narratives as fully human.

You write about your father, the photographer, in the poem, “Look at This.” How does the photographer teach the poet how to look?

My father, Frank Espada, created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a photo documentary of the Puerto Rican migration [triggered by the 1917 Jones Act], funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. (We’re hearing a great deal about the NEH these days.) I learned from him the connection between craft and commitment, the association between art and advocacy. From the beginning, his photographs hung on the walls of our apartment in the East New York section of Brooklyn. They hung on the walls of my imagination. They still do.

You don’t shy away from painting a whole, complex picture of your father, as in “My Father’s Practice Book.” When he was alive, how did you grapple with how much of him to bring to the page? Did he read your poems before publication?

I have been writing about my father for 40 years. There were poems I shared with him before publication, especially if I was telling a story that originated with him and I wanted to confirm the details. There were other poems I didn’t show. Since he died in 2014, I’ve continued to have a relationship with him. We continue to have relationships with the dead as well as with the living. I’m not talking about that in any kind of ethereal, spiritual sense, but rather a material sense. Now, I can expand that portrait of my father, so it becomes more complex and more complete. As he once put it to me: “That never happened—and besides, you should wait till people are dead to tell stories like that.”

“My Father’s Practice Book” is about my father as a photographer and my relationship to him as his assistant, whether it was in the field or in the office, carrying his camera bags or cataloging his photographs. But there’s also “The Monster in the Lake,” which is a poem about the cultural aggression that Puerto Ricans, and Latinos in general, face when it comes to their Spanish. The fact is that my father—who was a spokesperson for the community, a representative of the community, a leader of the community—was losing his Spanish along the way.

You’ve been a tenant lawyer and you’re a poet whose love of words came at the age of 15. How have your obsessions and preoccupations continued to deepen over the years in writing and publishing over 20 books?

Some of it is compulsion. I write because it is as natural as breathing. As you know, I’m a narrative poet. I’m a storytelling poet. There’s always another story to tell, especially stories that are untold. Now, we are facing a scenario, with the demonization of immigrants, where those stories must be told. Because of my experience as an advocate, I can tell some of those stories.

I’ll go back to my father again. My father was a migrant from the island of Puerto Rico. He was not undocumented since Puerto Ricans are citizens. Yet he came from a colony, with all the burdens of colonization. It’s a different kind of migrant experience, but migrant experience nevertheless. I grew up in the shadow of that migrant experience. Then, of course, my father documented the migrant experience in the Puerto Rican community through his photography: more influence.

Then I worked as a tenant lawyer for a program called Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

We were seeing people coming from Central America: from Guatemala, from El Salvador, fleeing the wars bought and paid for by our US tax dollars under the Reagan administration. Many of those people were undocumented. We represented them anyway, though technically we weren’t supposed to do that.

I go back to the word “advocacy.” As a lawyer, I was an advocate speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard. The same is true of my work as a poet. When we look at what is happening today, I reflect on the fact that mass deportation requires mass collaboration, and we don’t have to collaborate.

So many people populate your writing. Who gets listened to? Of all the people you’ve ever met or read about, when do you know you may memorialize them in a poem?

I have been doing this for a very long time. I published my first book in 1982. There is a little bell that goes off in my head after practicing poetry for so many years. That little bell oftentimes is the signal: “This is a poem.” Sometimes the bell goes off right away; sometimes it takes years. But that bell is there, and I listen to it.

Now, most often, I talk to my wife, Lauren. I’ve written quite a few poems in this book that originate with her. She’s the teacher in all the poems where we find a teacher. There are scenarios where she has told me a story, the bell goes off, and I say to her, “Tell me more.”

For example, the poem “Gonzo” is based on a story my wife told me. She used to teach developmental English at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey. At the same time, she was also volunteer-teaching adult literacy at a rehab center called Eva’s Village in Paterson. She encountered a man who did not know the alphabet. She was teaching him the alphabet using flash cards. In the middle of one session, he got to the letter S and couldn’t say it. He burst into tears. That’s all I knew. Later, I went back to her and said, “Can you tell me more?” I asked questions the way a poet might ask them. And she answered them the way a poet would answer them because she’s also a poet.

She is such a presence in this collection. The book is dedicated to her for a reason.

Describe your use of extensive endnotes—10 pages of them—in providing context for readers when you’re writing about people and historical events.

I first encountered endnotes in a collection of poetry by Adrienne Rich, whom I had the honor of meeting when we spent a day together at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Republic of Poetry (2006) was the first collection where I used endnotes. With each succeeding collection, the endnotes became more detailed. This is where you see the work done behind the scenes, because we can talk about the bell going off—“inspiration”—but there are many poems where I support the narrative with research. There is an emotional landscape I want to paint, but there is more: I have to do some reading.

Take the last book I did, Floaters. The title poem was about two Salvadoran immigrants who drowned crossing the Rio Grande. A photograph of their bodies went viral, triggering outrage and grief, but also skepticism from the Right. I wrote the poem as a response to that photograph and to that skepticism. Yet, it wasn’t a matter of only looking at the photograph. I read everything I could in English and Spanish. I not only read sources from the United States; I also read sources from El Salvador. At a certain point, media interest stopped in this country. But it didn’t stop in that country. I decided not only to write the poem but also to document my sources. This is the lawyer in me. This is me saying “Okay, you may think I made this up, but I didn’t.” In all the poems where something extraordinary or incredible happens, people may well suppose that I made it up; I don’t have to make it up. I don’t have to invent the incredible or the extraordinary. It’s there in the world. Yet, I want people to know the sources. I want to give credit where credit is due.

Your father was a documentary photographer, and you’re a documentary poet. Bearing witness is a big part of your work, and it can be a bit like taking a photograph. In “Florencia, Again and Again” you capture Steve Stern, your teacher and mentor, and his wife, Florencia Mallon, who is in memory hospice. It’s a moment in time. But you’re also giving her power and agency. It’s an example of a poem being an exquisite gift.

I bear witness. I’m influenced by the Latin American tradition of the “testimonio.” Steve not only taught me history at the University of Wisconsin; he also taught me how to think, how to think critically. He was both a mentor and a great friend. I found out, not long ago, that his wife Florencia was in memory hospice.

Steve had been in communication with me. His request was that he wanted to call me on the phone once in a while to hear me read poetry to him, as it would help him in this extremely difficult time. So, I called him and said “Steve, I’ve got a poem for you. Want to hear it?”

It’s a complex portrait of both the courage that we need to face the inevitable and the power of song to help us face it.

Florencia also asks in the poem, “How do you kill an idea?”

You zeroed in on something she said to me many years ago when I asked rather naively about the coup in Chile: “Why did they kill so many people?” In hindsight, it was the kind of question a very young person would ask. She said, “How do you kill an idea?”

We’re watching that process play out right now. There are attempts to kill ideas happening all around us in this country. Book banning represents the impulse to kill ideas. The elimination of DEI represents the impulse to kill ideas. The suppression of LGBTQ rights, especially trans rights, represents the impulse to kill ideas. The dehumanization, demonization, and deportation of immigrants represent the impulse to kill ideas.

Some ideas don’t die. Some may be suppressed. Some may be buried. But there are certain ideas that are central to who we are as a society and central to who we are as human beings. That’s what Florencia was saying about what happened in her homeland, Chile: Try jailing people. Try killing people. It doesn’t work. Those ideas are still there. All you’ve done is silenced people. And the irony of that question being situated in this poem is that now Florencia has been silenced. Or has she? Because she can still sing.

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Martín Espada has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, including Floaters (2021), winner of the National Book Award; Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016); and The Republic of Poetry (2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.

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Featured image: Photo of Martín Espada by David Gonzalez.