Imagine the Angels of Bread.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

My favorite book of poetry this year is Imagine the Angels of Bread, by Martin Espada (Norton). Here he continues to serve up his trademark vignettes of the indignities that working-class and immigrant Americans suffer every day. Some of these poems are similar to those he offered in his previous works, Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators.

This collection shows Espada moving beyond the forms that he has mastered. Now, in places, the style is less reportorial and more magical and redemptive, as in the title poem, which begins: "This is the year that squatters evict landlords," and ends with:

This is the year that those

who swim the border's undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing.

By far the most impressive poem is the ten-page epic, "Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies," which is dedicated to Clemente Soto Velez, the great Puerto Rican poet who was imprisoned for his activism and who died in 1993. Espada knew him well, and the poem retells the life of Clemente Soto Velez and the cause of Puerto Rican independence. The coda for the poem goes like this:

Hands without irons become dragonflies

red flowers rain on our hats

subversive angels flutter...