C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans

The award-winning poet and author of A Place to Stand crafts provocative portraits of addiction and the Mexican American experience. 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 shapedand continues to informhis raw, incisive voice. A heart-stopping series of episodes about addiction, C-Train features 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...