JAILBREAK OF SPARROWS: Martín Espada’s Book for All Marginalized Beings

Martín Espada

Jailbreak of Sparrows

Alfred A. Knopf / 2025 / 114 pp / $29 Hardback

Reviewed by James Long / June 2025

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About a third of the way through his new collection, in a poem titled “The Critic’s Tongue Did Not Sparkle with the Diamond Stickpin of Wit,” Martín Espada shares this chilling exchange from a highbrow dinner conversation:

Puerto Ricans? You’ve got a drug problem. Here’s how you fix it. Deport 

the drug dealers. Deport the addicts. Deport anyone who won’t talk to the police. 

I told him: We’re all citizens. We can’t be deported to Puerto Rico. The critic

spoke as if to instruct a man learning English: Deport them all anyway.

Espada, himself Puerto Rican, once served as a tenant lawyer and has written about the Latin American experience in our country for more than four decades. Now, in the midst of immigration hysteria and mass deportations, he brings us his signature witness and compassion with Jailbreak of Sparrows.

While the book culminates in elegies and also contains a number of more lyric-leaning pieces, Espada doesn’t shy away from opening with densely packed longer poems that, in certain moments, read like family memoir. This placement stakes an early claim for the importance of his story, one entwined with a struggle for liberation and marked by brutality. “Banquo’s Ghost in Paterson” invokes the friend and general whom Macbeth ordered killed to preempt a feared betrayal. Espada reimagines Banquo as one of his wife’s community college students, “Ralphie,” a gang member turned informer who can’t escape his past:

A week later, Ralphie stopped talking. A bullet split the braids he tucked

behind his ear, another informer facedown in the gravel on Rosa Parks  

Boulevard. His sister told the papers: He was trying to turn over a new leaf,

but her words bled out into the gravel.

Ralphie is identified only as a student, not by his origin or ethnicity, and this adds to the sense that Espada, whose great concern certainly is his people, also grieves a broader community. Later, back in the classroom and after his death, we see “Ralphie sitting there without a word, Banquo’s ghost in Paterson.”

Compelling titles (“Big Bird Died for Your Sins” and “Better Than Stealing a Necklace of Bullets” are two of them) and stunning central images lift Espada’s storytelling into poetry, and he never forgets that narrative’s role is to serve the lyric moment. We see this perhaps most aptly in the title poem. Here, Grandmother busts cousin Gisela reading a socialist newspaper which, we learn in stanza three, celebrated “the words a poet wrote in his cell / years ago to praise his beloved at the jailhouse door, as the crowds would sing / the verses that flew like a jailbreak of sparrows from the poet’s hands.”

As sparrows are tiny birds known for their resilience and alluring songs, a “jailbreak of sparrows” suggests an unstoppable tiny-but-mighty force, a metaphor that might be applied to the Puerto Rican people Espada sings of. We learn later in the poem that Puerto Rico National Guard forces massacred a group of pro-independence activists in the speaker’s ancestral hometown. He is awakened to this in the last lines as his father, a noted photographer, mails him a picture he took of a pro-government poster from that era found still hanging in a shack outside town: “On the back, he wrote Utuado, 1967, the words on the poster, and my name. / The poet walked through the jailhouse door. There was a jailbreak of sparrows.” The speaker, in the moment he discovers his own poetic urge, also becomes one with the tragic history of his people.

Espada’s last book, Floaters (Norton, 2021), contained a section titled “Love Song of the Kraken.” Jailbreak of Sparrows continues and expands on this method of sidestepping the love poem’s risk of sentimentality. As in Floaters, his method is reflecting ideas about love in caricatures that stand for a more personally identifiable speaker. He gives us love from the perspective of a fruit bat, a mona bird, a disembodied head in a jar. Espada is at his best in these poems when he is self-deprecating, as in “Love Song of Frankenstein’s Insomniac Monster.” In it, we imagine the challenges one might face sleeping with the speaker, Frankenstein's monster. Anyone who has shared a bed with another person will recognize the trek this spouse takes to the couch every night:

You are gone. I clomp down the stairs. I see you curled asleep on the couch

and murmur: Friend? I stumble over another man’s feet, my face looming

in close-up. You reach for me, oh bolted, screwed, sewn-up, fiendish me.

The love poems set a tone that prepares the way for Jailbreak’s final section, where Espada shows the elegy to be another kind of love song. These poems sing with deep lament for the lost, the culture and people he loves. Another of the book’s tropes, leftist politics, plays out prominently in this section. We meet the bookseller and Vietnam draft resister Eugene Povirk, named after American socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, and even William Carlos Williams, whose invitation to become Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1952 was abruptly withdrawn following baseless accusations that he was a member of the Communist Party. (It is also interesting to recall that Williams’s mother was Puerto Rican and his father was raised in the Dominican Republic.) The invitation was rescinded around the time Williams, who had been a practicing physician, was recovering from a devastating stroke. In “Insult,” Espada writes,

The G-men interrogated the chief of police, the editor of the newspaper

in his hometown, his neighbors on Ridge Road. The appointment as

Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress melted away, delay after

delay, the poet waiting for word as if lost again in the labyrinth of hospitals.

One of the most tender moments comes in the poem “The Puerto Rican with the Bolshevik Name,” for community activist and local politician Vladimir Morales. Espada mourns, “The last time, I didn’t vote for him. I was too busy bellowing / my poems in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the land of cigarettes, / where somebody said: Are you a communist? This time, I voted for him.” Soaked with regret, the poem chronicles missed opportunities and ends with the line, a posthumous tribute to Morales, “Now, too late, I sign my name to his petition. I am not too busy anymore.”

Jailbreak of Sparrows is appended with a rich Notes section full of details about the poems’ characters. The note on the book’s final poem, “The Iguanas Skitter Through the Cemetery by the Sea,” explains its reference to José de Diego, a Puerto Rican lawyer and political leader, whose own poem, mentioned in this one, draws on the Puerto Rican saying, “Every hawk has his kingbird,” the latter being a bird known for ferociously protecting its nest. Espada's speaker had visited the cemetery at a point when it was overtaken by iguanas. In the poem’s final lines, he writes, “The dead eyes of the iguanas, keeping vigil over the city of the dead, will never / see the asteroid of their extinction, the earth melting to suck their bones into / whirlpools of mud, the wave sweeping them to sea, the flight of the poet’s kingbird.” These creatures, which represent living beings in general as much as they do the Puerto Rican people in particular, are both doomed and resilient. In Jailbreak of Sparrows, Espada confirms, once again, he is the poet of suffering, marginalized lives everywhere.

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James Long’s poems have appeared in journals such as Appalachian Review, Kestrel, and Good River Review and are forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Gulf Stream Magazine. A three-time winner of the West Virginia Writers Inc. annual writing contest, he has attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman and holds an MFA in poetry from Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Long lives, works, and writes in Charleston, West Virginia.