Martin Espada is a Brooklyn born and raised poet of Puerto Rican heritage. His 'Rebellion is the cirlce of a lover's hands' is a very interesting poetry collection at least if you're interested in the kind of social and political commentary it contains. Personally I am--and the one poet he reminds me more of than any other is Philip Levine--maybe mixed in a little bit with the great Nicanor Parra. One might say he is a Latino comparable to Levine anyway. Levine's work has always celebrated his Jewish working class upbringing--one can almost see and smell the factory floor in his poems--one rises at dawn and sets off for work or even works the graveyard shift. It's a hard life--full of struggle and very little appreciation if any but the protagonists of his poems are not only workers they are survivors who find solace in the small things.

With Espada we get much the same but he reaches maybe even a little further--whether Puerto Ricans, Mexicanos or Central Americans for the most part they struggle with the most menial jobs and the subtle and the not so subtle racism too often occuring which comes their way more than less because of skin tone or language pronunciation. Here we have:

Jorge the church janitor finally quits

No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped the floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
outside the city
of their understanding.

No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.

What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.

No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.

Which shows Espada is not without a sense of humor (at least sometimes) when making a point. Anyway he has interesting and more often than not compelling turns of phrase. Maybe not the lightest touch but I don't think that's a particular goal of his. In any case I think Espada's poetry is worth exploring much further and I would recommend this collection to all the poetry/social critic buffs out there--I would suspect you know who you are already. ( )