The bilingual collection in which "Colibrí" appears, Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands, was awarded the 1989 PEN/Revson Award and garnered a good deal of praise from reviewers. Writing for Publishers Weekly, Penny Kaganoff notes, "All the poems are fine, but Espada is at his best in his pieces about the plight of migrant workers and refugees from Central America." Sam Cornish, in a review for Ploughshares, calls Espada "talented and promising" and writes, "Espada's work has integrity mingled with an ironic and sometimes bitter well-articulated sense of alienation by class and language." Roger Gilbert underscores Espada's political convictions as well. In the Partisan Review, Gilbert writes that Espada's poems are "continually informed by anger at social and economic injustices. This anger gives the book considerable moral urgency."

Arguing that Espada's poems "deserve an audience," Alan Gilbert praises Espada's style in the Boston...