Jimmy Santiago Baca
- Poet, Memoirist & Novelist,
Author of A Place to Stand
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"(Baca's) semiautobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Bound by Honor (1993), which was made into a feature-length film directed by Taylor Hackford.
Baca’s work is concerned with social justice and revolves around the marginalized and disenfranchised, treating themes of addiction, community, and the American Southwest barrios. In a Callaloo interview with John Keene, Baca claims, “I approach language as if it will contain who I am as a person”—a statement that reflects the poet’s interest in the transformative and generative power of language. Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979, 1991) was Baca’s first significant collection, one based on his imprisonment. In the Encyclopedia of American Literature, Catherine Hardy wrote that the poems in the volume “reveal an honest, passionate voice and powerful imagery full of the dark jewels of the American Southwest landscape (llanos, mesas, and chiles) and the chaotic urban landscape (nightclubs, rusty motors, and bricks) woven into a rich lyricism sprinkled with Spanish.”
Baca has conducted writing workshops in prisons, libraries, and universities across the country for more than 30 years. In 2004 he launched Cedar Tree, a literary nonprofit designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca holds a BA in English and an honorary PhD in literature from the University of New Mexico."
- PoetryFoundation.org |
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Breaking Bread with the Darkness
Book 1: The Esai Poems (2011) ***** amazon
"The Esai Poems are some of Baca's strongest poetic work. Already father of two grown sons, Baca explores the implications of beginning another family with another woman. Subsequent volumes will include explorations of self and family with Essays and Stories, The Lucia Poems (to his young daughter), and to his son, Tones and Gabe Poems and Essays."
- Amazon
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A Glass of Water (2009) ***** amazon
"Award-winning memoirist, poet, and activist, Jimmy Santiago Baca has established himself as an inspiring and important spokesperson for the Chicano experience, continually giving voice to the voiceless. His first novel, A Glass of Water is a gripping tale of family, loyalty, ambition, and revenge that takes us inside the tragedies unfurling along our country’s borders. Having made the nearly deadly journey across the border from Mexico, Casimiro and Nopal spend their days in the chili fields, building a life for their young sons. But when Nopal is brutally murdered, the boys are left to navigate this capricious new world without her. The elder son, Lorenzo, follows his father’s footsteps, devoting himself to the land, and falling in love with a strong-minded young woman who’s come to their migrant camp to study the lives of its workers. But Vito, hot-blooded and restless, breaks away to find fame as an itinerant boxer, gaining notoriety inside the ring and out. Eventually, the brothers’ journeys converge, bringing them face to face with a common enemy. A Glass of Water is a searing, heartfelt tribute to brotherhood, and an arresting portrait of the twisted paths people take to claim their piece of the American dream."
- Amazon
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Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007) ***** amazon
"In a Whitmanesque voice that aims toward American universals, while remaining grounded in his Chicano ancestry, Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of life in beautiful and accessible poems.
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 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 thumb-nail-sized yellow spider/ with poppy seed eyes."
-Amazon
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The Importance of a Piece of Paper (2005) ***** amazon
"In his first foray into short fiction, award-winning poet and memoirist Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the territory where old-world traditions meet new-world ambitions, and characters try to make something of themselves, while keeping their souls intact. Merging a refreshing innocence with a profound understanding of the world's brutality, The Importance of a Piece of Paper is a daring and arresting work that is at once fearless, tender, and inspiring."
- Amazon
Excerpt
from "Matilda's Garden"
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Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004) ***** amazon
"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 feet—repeatedly, rhythmically—on 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."
- Amazon
4.
5.
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Immigrants In Our Own
Land (1990)
***** google books
"An expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry. 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."
- Google Books
Ancestor
To My Own
Self
Count-time
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Martin & Meditations on the
South Valley (1987)
***** amazon
"Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martin & 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.' "
- Barnes and Noble
V
IX, part 6
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Black
Mesa Poems (1989) ***** amazon
" The narrator of these poems lives in an adobe house built from tiles "wagon'd to Black Mesa / one hundred fifty years ago." Baca draws directly for material from the small New Mexico town where he was born, telling of knife fights, the birth of children and animals, buying a lime-green patio set. He creates rituals from small gestures, expanding to mythic significance a boy who prefers red chile peppers, but eats the green his grandmother chooses. Few poets have paid such close attention to the passing seasons, particularly winter's harshness; although he finds this causes the death of animals, Baca also insists that "Nature was not all that cruel." Writing in short, crisp, rhythmic lines, Baca transfigures a seemingly barren landscape."
- From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Green Chile
A Daily Joy to
be Alive
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Working
in the Dark:
Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992) **** amazon
"...his poetry focuses on prison, darkness, night, myth, and Chicanismo. This is a collection of autobiographical essays exploring his ethnic identity and the process and experience of creation and writing; the essays are permeated with Baca's intensely lyrical sense of the empowerment of literacy and language. Appropriate for comprehensive contemporary poetry collections as well as Chicano literature collections.
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From Library Journal
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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A
Place to Stand (1979)
**** amazon
"Poetry seems antithetical to the poverty, racism, and violence that wracked Baca's tragic youth, but the power of language is what kept him alive and sane while he served hard time in a hellish federal prison. Now a prizewinning poet and screenwriter, Baca, born in New Mexico in 1952, was abandoned by his parents and put in an orphanage at age seven. He learned to fight but not to read and, in spite of good intentions, ran into nothing but trouble. Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted "doing time" into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca's harrowing story will stand among the world's most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature."
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Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association.
One
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Healing
Earthquakes (2001) ***** amazon
"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."
- Amazon
Ten
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C-Train
& 13 Mexicans (2002) ***** amazon
"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)."
- Amazon
Twenty-seven
Twenty-nine |
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