Poetry Collections
Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Abandoned as a child and a long time on the hard path to building his own family, Martin at last finds his home in the stubborn and beautiful world of the barrio. Jimmy Santiago Baca "writes with unconcealed passion," Denise Levertov states in her introduction, “but he is far from being a naive realist; what makes his writing so exciting to me is the way in which it manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events."
Black Mesa Poems is rooted in the American Southwest, the setting of Jimmy Santiago Baca's highly acclaimed long narrative poem, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (New Directions, 1987). Black Mesa Poems is rooted in the American Southwest, the setting of Jimmy Santiago Baca's highly acclaimed long narrative poem, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (New Directions, 1987). "Baca's evocation of this landscape," as City Paper noted, "its aridity and fertility, is nothing short of brilliant." The individual poems of Black Mesa are embedded both in the family and in the community life of the barrio, detailing births and deaths, neighbors and seasons, injustices and victories. Loosely interconnected, the poems trace a visionary biography of place.
Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."
Baca passionately explores the troubled years of his youth, from which he emerged with heightened awareness of his ethnic identify as a Chicano, his role as a witness for the misunderstood tribal life of the barrio, and his redemptive vocation as a poet.
In the tradition of Pablo Neruda, Set This Book On Fire! combines stunning lyrical intensity with pointed commitment to America's dispossessed.
Three poetic statements unite and intertwine in this slim volume to create a rare insight into the lives of people who bear witness to the exclusionary nature of society's most basic assumptions about the nature of gender and desire: men in women's bodies, outcasts, who make their living as prostitutes. With the caring eye of an intimate observer, Benjamin Alire Senz allows the reader to witness the hopes, fears and dangers of their transformations, sketching their daily lives in a series of short fragmentary prose-poems, showing the familiarity of the seemingly alien. Jimmy Santiago Baca's first person poem pushes the transformation further still, allowing as well as forcing the reader to recognize the frailty and pain caused by a culture's ideas of what constitutes the normal. James Drake's photographs unite the poems, complementing them with a visual thread of equally poetic intensity: changing faces, reflections in mirrors, blood and fears, as well as hopes and guardian angels
Combining a stunning lyrical intensity with a profound exploration of the human soul, Healing Earthquakes uses poetry to conjure a romance, from beginning to end. Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces us to a man and woman before they are acquainted and re-creates their first meeting, falling in love, their decision to make a family, the eventual realization of each other's irreconcilable faults, the resulting conflicts, the breakup and hostility, and, finally, their transcendence of the bitterness and resentment. Throughout the relationship we are privy to the couple's astonishing range of emotions: the anguish of loneliness, the heady rush of new love, the irritations and joys of raising children, the difficulties in truly knowing someone, the doldrums of breakup, and so on. It is impossible not to identify with these characters and to recognize one's own experience in theirs. As he weaves this story, Baca explores many of his traditional themes: the beauty and cruelty of the desert lands where he has spent much of his life, the grace and wisdom of animals, the quiet dignity of life on small Chicano farms. This is an extraordinary work from one of our finest poets.
Jimmy Santiago Baca's brilliantly received memoir, A Place to Stand, earned him the prestigious International Prize and offered a keyhole view into the brutal personal history that shaped -- and continues to inform -- his raw, incisive voice. In C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, he trains his hallmark lyrical intensity on the dark underbelly of addiction and takes us on an unforgettable guided tour of the darkest corners of a brutal, unjust world. C-Train is a heartstopping series of episodes from the life of Dream-boy, a young man who finds himself seduced, and later enslaved, by the siren song of cocaine. Part paean to the delicious power of intoxication, part lament for those helplessly under its power, C-Train is a ride its hero, and the reader, struggle to get off. In Thirteen Mexicans, Baca writes of the Chicano community and the gulf between the American dream and American reality. In searing, elegiac vignettes he portrays the raw beauty of life in the barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront how they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white society. Giving voice to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca illuminates the most unforgiving landscapes; yet his is a vision tempered by a searching hopefulness that brings these collections inching toward redemption. Baca's latest achievement will confirm his place as one of the nation's leading poets, a poet whose words "heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love" (Garrett Hongo). "[Baca] writes with ... an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events." -- Denise Levertov
In the title story, two siblings must face the brother who has betrayed them by selling his share of the family land and forsaking a centuries-old land grant, leaving an entire community vulnerable. In "The Three Sons of Julia," a long-suffering mother, whose one request is that all her sons come home to the barrio for the Fourth of July, watches her dream shatter as two of her sons - one a successful businessman with a white wife and the other a hard-drinking ex-con - nearly destroy her house, and each other, by the night's end. In "Runaway," a young orphan discovers the consolations of fraternity when he is forced to care for a boy whose circumstances are even more dire than his own.
New poetry by the Champion of the International Poetry Slam and winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the prestigious new International Award. A romantic and a populist, Jimmy Santiago Baca celebrates nature and creativity: the power of "becoming more the river than myself" in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande . These poems are an expansive meditation on Baca's spiritual life, punctuated always with his feetrepeatedly, rhythmicallyon the ground as he runs every morning along the river. Baca contemplates his old life, his new love, his family and friends, those living and those dead, injustices and victories, and Chicano culture. As Denise Levertov remarked, Baca "writes with unconcealed passion" and "manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythical and archetypal significance of life events."
In Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, Jimmy Santiago Baca continues his daily pilgrimage through the meadows, riverbanks, and bosques of the Rio Grande where winter dies, spring explodes, and inextricable links between the human spirit and the natural world are revealed. In Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, Jimmy Santiago Baca continues his daily pilgrimage through the meadows, riverbanks, and bosques of the Rio Grande where winter dies, spring explodes, and inextricable links between the human spirit and the natural world are revealed--"the river and I see through each other's skins / behind the eyes into the tunnels of water-bone and rushing marrow." These poems expand upon those in Baca's recent Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande -- his visions of love and loss, poverty and renewal, redemption and war are reflected in the rocks, trees and animals of his beloved New Mexico. In Spring Poems the words of the river "rise around thorny thickets / then descend again into the burbling stubble," and the poet surrenders himself to this place where his own words are woven by "a thumbnail-sized yellow spider/ with poppy seed eyes." Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother, but was later sent with his brother to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a Federal prison at the age of twenty-one that he began to turn his life around: there he learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry. His memoir A Place To Stand won the prestigious International Award. He is Champion of the International Poetry Slam and winner of The Before Columbus American Book Award and the Pushcart Prize.
An extraordinary collection of poetry that takes the reader from the depths of despair, through outrage, to transcendent joy. In these searingly intense poems, Baca inhabits the subjects of his poems and makes them sing.
"I paced my cell with a book in one hand and a knife under my mattress. I knew I could have a long and happy life with a book in my hand or I could have a miserable short life with the shank that was in the mattress." -Jimmy Santiago Baca Stories from the Edge enriches and extends Jimmy Santiago Baca's critically acclaimed memoir, A Place to Stand . Early stories elaborate on his travails as an abandoned child in an orphanage. Later stories draw on Baca's post-prison life as a writer and his ongoing work with struggling adolescents, prisoners, and society's dispossessed. Centered around conflicts and life-altering choices, Baca's gripping personal narratives will resonate with adolescents and adults alike. Learn more about the companion teacher's guide, Adolescents on the Edge . Save $ with a Teacher's Pack and Student Bundle.
Award-winning writer Jimmy Santiago Baca is acclaimed for his talent in weaving personal and political threads to create pertinent and poignant narratives. He addresses universal issues with vigor and passion as well as emotional grace and vivid sensory detail, establishing him as a vital voice in American poetry. Singing at the Gates is a collection of Baca’s work that stretches back over four decades. These poems revitalize the national dialogue: raging against war and imprisonment, fighting for prison reform, celebrating family and the bonds of friendship, heightening appreciation for and consciousness of the environment. A career-spanning selection, it includes his early work as a budding poetwritten during his years in the penitentiary, where he taught himself to read and writein addition to poems from his first chapbook and recent pieces meditating on the significance of breaking through adversity and oppression. From outraged to serene, playful to meditative, Baca’s voice is robust, searing, sensuous, and tender. This arresting collection displays the breadth and depth of Baca’s poetic powerwith irreverent charm and disarming freedom of mind and soul. The vital pulse of love abiding in these poems will affirm and reaffirm, for both longtime and newfound readers, his devotion to truth and beauty.
Poet-activist Jimmy Baca immerses the reader in an epic narrative poem, imagining the experience of motherhood in the context of immigration, family separation, and ICE raids on the Southern border. Jimmy Santiago Baca sends us on a journey with Sophia, an El Salvadorian mother facing a mountain of obstacles, carrying with her the burden of all that has come before: her husband’s murder, a wrenching separation from her young son at the border, then rape and abuse at the hands of ICE, yet persevering: “I keep walking/carrying you in my thoughts,” she repeats, as she wills her boy to know she is on a quest to find him.
Not long ago 30 million buffalo thundered across the land we now call North America. By the late 1800s, a calculated extermination campaign had nearly extinguished this mythic being, leaving less than 500 animals in its ferocious wake. Today it is nearly impossible to imagine, let alone feel, millions of hooves drumming in our stomach; smell churned earth and musky beast rising on hot prairie air; see the vast ocean of animals that fed us, clothed us, sustained a continental trade and economies, inspired the ceremonies, prayers, and art that defined our very identities and cultures. Brave visionaries are responsible for the recovery of the small herds sprinkled across the landscape today. An enormous feat to which we all owe an enormous thank you.But neither humanity, nor wild nature, have recovered from the ravaging loss of this epic spirt who once nourished our bodies, hearts, and souls. The current bison restoration effort is far from enough. Especially now when the world is more at risk and divided than it’s ever been. The fault lines of politicized injustice, racism, and violence are raw and exposed and the natural systems that sustain life are unravelling. Buffalo restoration not only provides a path to heal our fractured relationship with the natural world, but also with each other and our own humanity. Breathing life into and gaining fluency in the principles of the Buffalo Way—Respect. Relationship. Reciprocity. Rewilding. Rematriation. Reconciliation—can guide us to an entirely different world: a world that is diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just. A world that not only survives, but thrives.Art and culture are potent vehicles for this challenging journey and the emergence of Buffalo Circles serve as both catalytic ceremony and call to collective inspired action. The Buffalo Circles are an invitation to evoke Buffalo in our words, painting, graffiti, music, dance, film, and sculpture. Let’s reignite Buffalo’s creative fire and our own—so we can once again walk the Buffalo Way together.