Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande - Softcover

Baca, Jimmy Santiago

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121575X ISBN 13: 9780811215756

Publisher: New Directions, 2004

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author:

Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1952. His parents abandoned him at the age of two, and he lived with his grandmother for several years before being placed in an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison at the age of twenty-one for drug offenses. It was in prison that he learned to read and write and began to compose poetry. His book Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, a pair of long narrative poems, won an American Book Award in 1988. In addition to his poetry collections and stories, Baca wrote the screenplay for the movie Bound by Honor, which was released by Hollywood Pictures in 1993.

From Publishers Weekly:

The inspiring and romantic aura of the riverine Mexican border, its flora and its fauna suffuse this very clear book-length sequence from Baca, author of Black Mesa Poems, the memoir A Place to Stand, as well as books of stories and essays. These 39 poems-all long-lined, casual and determinedly optimistic-largely eschew the tales of hardship that mark earlier work, focusing instead on Baca's present-day projects and dreams; "running along this path every other day" through the river valley, he hopes to "keep my connection to the spirits strong,/ keep my work spiritual," explaining how "the river in me sings my gratefulness to you and others," "my grief rain-tears, my joyous natural-spring laughter." Baca seeks a Whitmanesque voice that aims toward human universals, while remaining grounded in his Chicano ancestry. A "Rio Grande bosque" (forest) "on the verge of bursting forth with spring" becomes an Edenic refuge and a symbol for everything and everyone else his speaker loves: his faith, his America, and (especially late in the book) the mother of his children: "you on the bed, nursing our son,/ your laughter a prayer to the wind." While many of the images and themes here are predictable, but readers who have followed Baca this far will certainly want to come along for his heartfelt exploration of the American Southwest and of "the contradictions/ that come with being human."
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 081121575X
• ISBN 13: 9780811215756
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144