"In Jimmy Santiago Baca's haunting story collection, intricate family dramas . . . play out against the luminous, wide-open backdrop of New Mexico." —Los Angeles Times 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. In "Matilda's Garden," an old farmer pines for his wife of fifty years who died in her sleep one-night months before. He is lured to the garden in the middle of the night by what he thinks is her presence, only to meet a gruesome fate. In "The Importance of a Piece of Paper," two siblings must face the brother who has betrayed them by selling his share of the family land, 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 for the Fourth of...

Award-winning writer Jimmy Santiago Baca, a vital voice in American poetry, weaves personal and political threads to create a pertinent and poignant narrative infused with vigor and passion, emotional grace and vivid sensory detail. Singing At The Gates is a collection of new and previously published poems that reflect back over four decades of Baca's life. These are poems that revitalize the national dialogue: raging against war and imprisonment, 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 poet, written while serving a five-year prison sentence; poems drawn from Baca's first chapbook; and recent pieces meditating on the significance of breaking through oppression.Singing at the Gates displays the breadth and depth of Baca's poetic power—with irreverent charm and disarming freedom of mind and soul. The vital pulse of...

Acclaimed author Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the writing life and social responsibility in this novel about a Hollywood screenwriter who returns to his small hometown in New Mexico to compose the story that has haunted him his whole life, his relationship with his father, but instead finds himself unable to ignore the quirky characters around him, "the misfits."

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."

A Glass of Water is a gripping tale of family, loyalty, ambition, and revenge that offers an intimate look into the tragedies unfurling at our country’s borders. The first novel from award-winning memoirist, poet, and activist, Jimmy Santiago Baca, it is a passionate and galvanizing addition to Chicano literature.The promise of a new beginning brings Casimiro and Nopal together when they are young immigrants, having made the nearly deadly journey across the border from Mexico. They settle into a life of long days in the chili fields, and in a few years their happy union yields two sons, Lorenzo and Vito. But when Nopal is brutally murdered, the boys are left to navigate life in this brave but capricious new world without her.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 ever-elusive American dream.

"There's no way you can do this reentry thing," Orlando Lucero tells himself after getting out of prison. He has spent most of his life institutionalized, first in an orphanage and then in the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling weed. Orlando knows nothing about freedom. What does one do with it? What is it?His brother promised to teach him the carpentry trade, but Orlando quickly discovers Camilo is—like their parents—an addict, robbing and stealing to feed his habit. So he turns to Lila, his prison pen pal who encouraged both his poetry writing and sexual fantasies. Soon he moves in with her and engages in the acts he dreamed about while incarcerated, but living the straight life seems impossible. "Freedom is full of hazards, lots of sharp edges, and they cut me at every turn." As he is sucked back into a life of crime, he can't help but think going back to prison would be a relief. Renowned poet Jimmy Santiago Baca explores in lyrical prose one young man's...

In this haunting meditation, interspersed with beautiful poems, poet and activist Jimmy Santiago Baca reflects on how the wounds of his past are represented in his passionate face, both the one he knows intimately, but the public face he sometimes has difficulty recognizing. His journey from abandonment to incarceration to stardom as a world-famous poet is engraved in his expressions, and in what is hidden behind them. With echoes of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, Baca's words speak for a people alienated by history, in search of their own recognizable faces. The Face is the record of a lasting quest for self-recognition by the nation's preeminent Chicano and Native-American poet.