Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

“Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” is one of the best-known works by Martin Espada, a leading American poet of the late 20th and early 21st century. It features as one of the poems in his evocatively titled 1993 collection City of Coughing and Dead Radiators. The poem is a short piece of free verse in two stanzas, detailing an experience working in a printing plant. It is written in simple, direct language and focuses attention on the often-hidden figure of the factory or manual laborer. The poem should be located in the context of an American poetry scene which in the 1980s and 90s increasingly engaged with urban social and political realities. Espada was a key figure to emerge from this scene, and like his contemporary Mark Doty, whose poems captured experiences of the AIDS epidemic, Espada puts lived experience at the heart of his poems. While Doty memorializes the tragic experience of that time for many gay people, Espada’s work aims to bring into focus the lives of the urban, immigrant poor. In “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” as in many other poems, Espada speaks and writes from a position of authority on his subject.