Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems - Hardcover

"[A] fiery retrospective collection. . . . Baca's poems are warm and furious, feathered and drumming, plowed and tattooed, righteous and prayerful. His is a clarion and necessary voice, and this standout volume belongs in every library." --Booklist "This is rust-under-your-fingernails, dust-in-your-eyes, blood-in-your-mouth poetry. This is the kind of poetry that reflects the maddening of souls and chronicles a yearning for justice." --American Way "Jimmy Santiago Baca is one of New Mexico's treasures . . . For anyone who's ever had their life changed through art or words, [he] is a poet that speaks your language." --Weekly Alibi "What an achingly beautiful collection this is. So split open, so raw, honest, vulnerable, real. Spanning Baca's life in poetry, you feel the enormity of his heart and intelligence." --Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones and The True Secret of Writing "If you're Mexican in the United States today, you are outraged by how your people are treated. If you're a poet, you use your words to denounce that outrage. And if you're Jimmy Santiago Baca, those words become raw, intimate, transcendent poems, meant not only for your people but for the nation as a whole. America, after all, is still an inclusive dream worth fighting for. Racism will eventually be brought to its feet, thanks in part to poetry." --Ilan Stavans, general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature

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 love abiding in these poems will affirm and reaffirm, for both longtime and newfound readers, his devotion to truth and beauty.