For Instance: Poems by Rhina P. Espaillat, Preorder
Dominican-American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat published her first poems in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1947 when she was fifteen years old. At sixteen, she became the youngest member of the Poetry Society of America. But then life—marriage, children, a career as a high school teacher—took precedence over her literary work. Long years of poetic silence followed those early successes, until her retirement from teaching in 1990 when, at the encouragement of her beloved husband Alfred Moskowitz, Espaillat began to write verse again, devoting her “time to what I really loved.”
Now, at 94 years old, she is releasing her ninth full-length collection of original poetry, For Instance. These poems, like all of Espaillat’s poems, live at the intersection of lyricism and idea, harnessing life’s experiences and their attendant emotional weights with wisdom and wit, with music, metaphor, and meaning. In For Instance, she demonstrates her characteristic embrace of paradox and mystery, always observing the various sides and angles of a situation. On the topic of love, a deaf couple “sing with their four hands.” As the man “inscribes the air / with urgencies,” Espaillat’s speaker cannot “even try to look elsewhere.” But, later, a mordant Espaillat also notices another couple: a newly engaged woman who, instead of reveling in romantic joy, immediately begins phoning the news to all her friends while her husband-to-be wonders whether he’ll marry “mate or mob.” Having “quarreled long” with God, Espaillat reviews the pros and cons of the argument, weighing the Rapture and “the flames of Hell” against “Bach’s nimble stitching; how light looks / dappled with stained glass; the silent nooks / where scribes grew old retrieving ancient books.” On old age and death, Espaillat’s words are without equal: From an aggrieved conversation with the mirror: “Do I know you? You’re wearing my nightgown . . .”
And while, “old anguish is the worst,” Espaillat reminds us that it is love that spins the sun and all the stars. In “Guidelines,” she unites these themes in what is a personal vademecum:
Here’s what you need to do, since time began:
find something—diamond-rare or carbon-cheap,
it’s all the same—and love it all you can . . .
It’s going to hurt. That was the risk you ran
with your first breath . . .
Praise for Rhina P. Espaillat
In her celebrated poem “Workshop,” Rhina Espaillat writes: “I’ve been putting a life together, like / supper, like a poem, with what I have.” Over the course of her career as a major figure in American letters, Espaillat has put together a body of work that, like the best kind of supper, combines everyday ingredients in unforgettable ways. Her poems beckon us into a world where the tension between the familiar and the strange heightens our senses, an effect underscored by her mastery of language’s sonic powers across multiple languages. She is a poet of story and song, una poeta de historias and cancionces, and she is one of the greatest living practitioners of the art form. With the release of For Instance, we are blessed that Rhina Espaillat has invited us, once again, to feast at her table.
—Caitlin Doyle
Rhina P. Espaillat stands as one of the finest and most important American poets of the last four decades. Her work speaks with the voices of many ages, familiar and contemporary, and yet fluent and flush with the Spanish of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, such that the mysteries of the spirit ring through the corridors of the everyday. Hers is a poetry that can speak all things with myriad-minded ease.
—James Matthew Wilson
The power of even the best poets begins to flag as they reach their eighth and ninth decades. Donald Hall said it well: “As I grew older—collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five—poetry abandoned me.” Against those odds, here in these pages, the beloved Dominican-American poet Rhina P. Espaillat offers us her ninth collection of poems in her 95th year. For Instance includes some of the finest poems she has written in a lifetime dedicated to the art and craft of poetry.
Rhina Espaillat has no time for the romanticized, bowdlerized stories nostalgia offers; she wants to grasp with her imagination the true essence of the things, the places and especially the people she loves so they will never be lost. She employs imagination in its classical definition, as a form of memory, of preservation. She is an Orpheus who “armed with his weapons, the lyre and his voice” approached Hades and demanded entry into the underworld, determined to bring back his beloved Eurydice.
—Alfred Nicol
Rhina P. Espaillat brings the whole of herself to what she writes. Her generosity, her curiosity, her accuracy, her sass, her keen eye and lack of arrogance, so that everything gets her thorough, absorbed, and exquisite attention—from cockroaches to begonias to dogs to people who fall asleep at her poetry readings. She celebrates the ordinary, picks it up, turns it around and around, until it radiates with rich complexity, meaning, and new life. These moments become sacramental moments, many of them taking place inside the commonplace chores of everyday housekeeping and mothering: in fact the ordinary becomes the cache of the extraordinary.
—Julia Alvarez
I met Rhina Espaillat in 2010 at the West Chester Poetry Conference. She was the keynote speaker; I was a first-time attendee. Nonetheless, Rhina introduced herself to me with genuine interest and warmth, and she has remained so over the years. I found her to be as I find her poetry: elegant, graceful, precise, insightful and accessible. Rhina holds herself to the highest standards of meter and form, and she makes it look easy. She writes of home, friends, family, life and death, things of importance to all humanity. Read her work. Rhina not only speaks to us, she speaks for us.
—Susan Spear
Rhina Espaillat is a force of nature and a force for good in the world. Her poetry has earned a place beside the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur.
—A. M. Juster
Rhina Espaillat’s vibrant poems sparkle with delight, humor, and hope—even on occasions of sadness, regret, or tragedy. It is this marvelously encompassing human scope, this evergreen magic, that draws readers so strongly to her poems. She unlocks wonders from the everyday. She can transform any given moment into memorable art. That is her gift. With an authentic emotional touch and extraordinary artistic facility, she conjures deeply affecting meditations, never flinching from unsettling subject matter while celebrating the joys of being alive.
—Ernest Hilbert
Descending from the rickety bridge of utilitarian and formulaic patterns of thought into the foggy hollows of what we ignore, or dismiss, or repress, Rhina Espaillat returns again and again with dazzling and unexpected treasures. A consummate poet, at times a nearly perfect poet, Espaillat has for decades thrilled her readers with her formative vision and formidable ear, and I expect esteem for her radiant poems will only continue to rise.
—Ryan Wilson
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
126 Pages
