Martín Espada

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As a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney, Martín Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for human rights and reclaiming the historical record. His critically acclaimed collections of poetry celebrate—and lament—the working class experience. Whether narrating the struggles of immigrants as they adjust to life in the United States or chronicling the battles that Latin Americans have waged against their own repressive governments, Espada has given voice to otherness, powerlessness, and poverty in poetry that is at once moving and vivid. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and several books of essays, the translator of Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez, and the editor of influential anthologies such as El Coro (1997) and Poetry Like Bread (1994). Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has also taught at the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, Holy Cross College, Emerson College, Wheelock College, Tufts University, and Suffolk University Law School. Source

 

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours

at a printing plant

that manufactured legal pads:

Yellow paper

stacked seven feet high

and leaning

as I slipped cardboard

between the pages,

then brushed red glue

up and down the stack.

No gloves: fingertips required

for the perfection of paper,

smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands

would slide along suddenly sharp paper,

and gather slits thinner than the crevices

of the skin, hidden.

Then the glue would sting,

hands oozing

till both palms burned

at the punchclock.

 

Ten years later, in law school,

I knew that every legal pad

was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,

that every open lawbook

was a pair of hands

upturned and burning.

 

Published:

1993

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Childhood & Coming of Age

Education & Learning

Memory & The Past

Politics

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Sensory Detail

words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)

Symbolism

a word, object, action, character, or concept that embodies and evokes a range of additional meaning and significance.