What makes this story [Martín] succeed is its honesty, a brutal honestly, as well as Baca’s original imagery and the passion of his writing. Moreover, a history is being written of a culture of poverty, which, except for a few poets, is absent in American poetry.

Gary Soto, San Francisco Chronicle

Immigrants In Our Own Land

Poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca’s remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca “is far from being a naive realist,” but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he “writes in unconcealed passion.”

Paperback(published Nov, 01 1990)

ISBN
9780811211451
Price US
12.95

Ebook(published Nov, 01 1990)

ISBN
9780811223317
Page Count
96
Portrait of Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Contemporary Chicano poet and writer of short stories and screen plays

What makes this story [Martín] succeed is its honesty, a brutal honestly, as well as Baca’s original imagery and the passion of his writing. Moreover, a history is being written of a culture of poverty, which, except for a few poets, is absent in American poetry.

Gary Soto, San Francisco Chronicle