Poet Martín Espada

...once the poem leaves me and takes flight, it belongs to the reader. I want my poems to be useful. I'm gratified when my poems go where I can't go, to weddings or funerals, to prison, to other countries in other languages. (I've been translated into Turkish!) Sometimes readers let me know, in dramatic ways, that the poems belong to them. I met a young journalist at a reading in New York who had a quote from “Imagine the Angels of Bread” tattooed on his leg.

-Martín Espada