Martín Espada

"I used to sit on the stairs outside the courtroom and scratch out poems on legal pads while I was waiting for our cases to be called. There were juvenile hearings prior to the housing cases, and of co…"

"A Puerto Rican writer from New York is doubly dislocated: first, there is dislocation from Puerto Rico; secondly, there is Puerto Rico’s dislocation from itself. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United …"

"Everybody takes his or her reality for granted. Everybody takes for granted the reality we see, we hear. That’s true for life as well as poetry. We grow up in certain circumstances, in a certain envir…"

"My diction, my choice of words, is as precise as I can make it. The images that I use, the evocation of the senses, again, relies upon a certain exactitude. You can see how what I did with language as…"