Breaking Bread with Darkness Books

He wakes from his afternoon siesta,/ flapping legs and hands,/ a bluebird perched on the birch/ branch of mother's arm/ ready to raid/ cornfields/ in his father's heart/ THE ESAI POEMS is the first of four books under the series title of BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DARKNESS by American Book Award recipient Jimmy Santiago Baca. The Esai poems are a poignant blend of Baca's wonder of his and his partner's newborn son, and the thoughts and observations of the world he will be inheriting, includlding, including war, racism, indifference and greed. Through Esai the wonder-struck new father explores the idealic world of his family through Esai's new eyes, "He studies his hands as if they are newly discovered planets . . ." but realizing the harsh realities of our times adds perspective with juxtapositions: "I'll wait to tell him how in some places armies cut off the hands of rebels..." Written as a series of thematically connected and dated poems, moving back and forth between ideas, The Esai Poems are some of Baca's strongest poetic work. Already father of two grown sons, Baca explors the implications of beginning another family with another woman. Subsiquent volumes will include explorations of self and family with Essays and Stories, The Lucia Poems (to his young daugher), and to his son, Tones and Gabe Poems and Essays.

The Lucia Poems is the second of four books by American Book Award recipient Jimmy Santiago Baca that is part of a series titled Breaking Bread With The Darkness. The Lucia Poems are about Lucia's father remembering the roads that bright him to the present time in whih daughter, lucia, emanates a special lift, gives oof the illumination that startled his soul into a recognition of gratitude for her-- he opens the baggage of events over the last thirty years, events that almost killed him, swallowed him in their darkness, but which he somehow survived, and now he approaches or speaks into the present and future, speak to his daughter with a redemptive and courageous conviction that perhaps he made it, because his dream was to have ehrm he endured because she was coming to him in the future, his dream little girl, who know walks at his side to school every day and who he bows laughing nd serenely imbued by her star-dust presence, he the father is happy and fulfilled, nothing that all the experiences in the poems were worth enduring because of her arrival.