[Breaking Bread with the Darkness 02] • The Lucia Poems

About the Book:

In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, American Book Award winner Jimmy Santiago Baca celebrates parenthood and presents, with brutal honesty, the daily complexities of adult life in the age of 9/11 and the Iraq War. This ex-convict, an essential voice in world poetry, chronicles the changes that envelop him upon the arrival of two of his children, Lucia and Esai. Despite “twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence," wherein he is faced with "beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings,” Baca refuses to give in to evil and despair. The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to the failings of one generation, and pass on humane advice to the next.

About the Author:

Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning poet, known internationally for his lyrical, politically charged verse. Of Apache and Chicano ancestry, at the age of twenty-one he was convicted on drug charges and spent six and a half years in prison, where he found his voice as a poet through correspondence with Denise Levertov. His many books include Black Mesa Poems (1995) and A Place to Stand (2001). He also wrote the screenplay for the film Blood In, Blood Out (1993). More information is available at his website.