The Poem, the Poem, the Poem, and the Poet’s Hand: A Review of Martín Espada’s Jailbreak of Sparrows

Jailbreak of Sparrows
Martín Espada
Knopf (2025)
$ 29.00

Shortly before Tara Lipinski became the youngest champion in women’s figure skating history, a great American poet took on Nike, rejecting an offer from an ad agency that might have led to $2500 and national television exposure. How many poets today would reject a similar offer? I’d like to think many would, but I’m not so sure. One did. “A poem is not a Pop-Tart®,” he said. He was taking a stand against brutal labor practices and rapacious advertising targeted at children and teens, many of whom lived in poverty. This public calling-out was a rare instance of a poet acting as an unacknowledged legislator of the world. Younger poets may not know, and older poets may not remember the facts outside his bio, but Martín Espada is a lion. Since his first collection, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, was published in 1982, Espada has been writing and living an engaged and profoundly moving poetry of witness (even before Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting coined the term). Today, Espada has ascended into the Empyrean of the American poetry establishment, winning the Ruth Lilly Prize and The National Book Award. Espada’s 2006 collection, The Republic of Poetry, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Knopf published his newest collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows. Norton brought forth the previous eight books. All those accolades and prestigious publishers matter, but none of them matter as much as the efflorescence of a late style that has occurred in his last four books (The Trouble Ball, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, Floaters, and Jailbreak).

The first hallmark of Espada’s late style, developed over these latest four collections is his mastery of the long line. In an essay I wrote about Floaters, which appeared online at The Southern Humanities Review, I note:

“Espada’s mastery of the long line in Floaters places it in dialogue with Leaves of Grass, “Howl,” “Jubilate Agno,” the King James version of the Bible, and William Blake’s prophetic writing. However, Espada’s poetry does not merely concern itself with the mysticisms and pyrotechnics of vatic utterance. Espada’s long lines are not solely a byproduct of poetic influence, a conversation with all those bards who have taken the line to the edge of prose. Espada has made the long line his own. Espada’s long lines river out and rage and gently tentacle what William Carlos Williams called “the American grain,” expressing fluencies of justice and truth that run counter to the superficialities of social media and the bankrupt rhetoric of politicians.”

If, in Floaters, Espada perfected the long line as an organizing aesthetic principle, Jailbreak of Sparrows provides the apotheosis of this stylistic choice, a technical ascent into a near perfect mirroring of form and content. In the condorlike, albatrossesque, pterodactylish wingspan of these lines, Espada feels at home and natural and authentic as he soars through outrage and ecstasy and memory toward hope and equity and honor.

The other prominent feature of Espada’s late style is that it offers us a poetry of witness bookended by two specific types of love (filial and erotic). Espada’s father (Frank) and his wife (Lauren) loom large in these collections (prominently so in Floaters and Jailbreak of Sparrows). The charge of the amorous, the romantic, the marital animates this poetry and sends it vibrating out into the universe. The love poems in Jailbreak, especially those in the third section, tend toward the surreal, as their titles indicate: “Love Song of the Bat with Vertigo,” “Love Song of the Polar Bear Mascot at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island,” “Love Song of the Atheist Marionette,” “Love Song of Frankenstein’s Insomniac Monster,” and “Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar.” The beloved in these poems transubstantiates into a subversive grimoire palimpsest of all the protean, cartoonish, glorious possibilities of both love and the love poem itself. Perhaps no poem in the book lives this alchemy better than “My Beloved the Blasphemer Causes a Scuffle at the Bar,” wherein the beloved begins as a schoolteacher in “black-frame glasses” and a “green dress embroidered with flowers / and birds on branches,” but who then transforms into “Cal, a man with the stump of an arm, who lost his job in the steel / mill, who lost his arm, some say, at the steel mill, who crushes a case of beer / and curses the liberals…” In a previous poem, the beloved transforms into an intrepid driver careening down the New Jersey Turnpike, as the other drivers transform into berserker Vikings screaming “Vahalla!” These transformations, astonishing as they are, invoke the strange ordinary heroisms committed love, at its best, engenders in us. Therefore, Lauren Espada, a tremendous poet in her own right and a public-school teacher, provides not only the charge of ardency behind her husband’s words, but also provides one ethical and moral pole of this collection.

The other cynosure of this collection shines from the legacy of the poet’s father, Frank Espada, a community organizer and photographer, whose presence glints from every poem, sometimes as subject, sometimes as presiding angel. Martín Espada, known long into his adulthood as “el hijo de Frank,” as the poet relates in “My Father’s Practice Book,” continues his father’s work as “rabble-rouser” and as “Puerto Rican/ who spoke for other Puerto Ricans.” Frank Espada’s luminary egalitarianism fuses with the history of Puerto Rican resistance in the title poem while evoking the story of Juan Antonio Corretjer, poet and political prisoner, who was celebrated at festivals “where singers would sing the words a poet wrote in his cell/ years ago to praise his beloved at the jailhouse door, as the crowd would sing/ the verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hands.” Espada, the son, with his own poet’s hands, constellates the arc of struggle from the contemporary moment, through Espada, the father’s camera clicks and bullhorn shouts, back to Corretjer and others who stood up against power in the form of Empire and Capital. Espada’s is a political poetry far removed from the timebound fractious polemical invective that sometimes (and almost inevitably) underwrites public discourse responding to the Trump administration’s ongoing machinations. The pulse of everyday life is strong in Espada’s poetry; everywhere in Espada’s poems you can feel his experience as a tenant lawyer pulsating just below the surface. Espada’s poems know that “even the word love in your ear was useless medicine against the vertigo” of our present moment. Espada reminds us that political poems need not vacillate between the staid and the screed; political poems need not be boring. Espada is not afraid to immolate Big Bird and call puppet 911. The risky irreverence and humor of these poems elevate the deadly serious, socially conscious, messages at their hearts. As Wallace Stevens wrote in his Adagia, Espada knows that “realism is a corruption of reality.” How better do you meet the problems of a nation that has succumbed to a reality television ontology, under the aegis of a reality television star, than with the transformative antirealism of Espada’s late style?

In his posthumously published book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward Said, borrowing from Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on Beethoven’s late work, wrote: “lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present.” At sixty-eight years old, Espada is not exactly in his dotage. However, Jailbreak of Sparrows embodies this fully conscious, memory-rife, presentness. The list of great poets who wrote distinctive work later in life is long; W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney come to mind. The story of many poets who came into prominence in the mid to late twentieth century was one of loosening the formal constraints that had marked their earlier poetry (think James Dickey, James Wright, and Stanley Kunitz).

In contemporary poetry, an inverse arc has sometimes occurred. In my view, it is no coincidence that three of the greatest living American poets, Marie Howe, William Heyen, and Espada have embraced formal innovations that coincide with a total mastery of their craft and a radical synthesis of the thematic concerns that have dominated their oeuvres. Howe’s newest poems, as highlighted in her recently published New and Selected, unfold in monostich “stanzas,” separating each line, even enjambed lines, by a space (stanzas, when they do occur are indicated by double spacing). Heyen’s late work, published by micro-presses and criminally underread, embraces the rigor of his invented forms, the scherzo and the single-line couplet. Espada meanwhile has perfected the long-lined lyric narrative poem. In Jailbreak of Sparrows, Espada’s long lines render in epic the struggles of everyday people: teachers, immigrants, neighbors, the poor, the powerless, the meek who have not inherited the Earth, the silent and the silenced. Espada guides us through “the typos, the strikethroughs, the curses, the gig, the poem, the poem, the poem.” “The poem, the poem, the poem” is where we remain. I, for one, am glad to take this poet’s hand.