Healing Earthquakes

June 18, 2001
Building on the achievement of the epic poem Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
and his memoirs Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet in the Barrio
and the forthcoming A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet
(Forecasts, May 28), World Heavyweight Poetry Bout champ Baca's new book-length work is a sprawling journal of epic proportions. A series of small poems divided among five books, it explores the history of love in the poet's personal relationships: in (and not in) his childhood community ("as I am born again in the suffering of my people"); his mother ("I wanted to suckle them again and crawl up inside her/ again/ and always be innocent") and brother ("your dying/ made a rush of silver knives/ explode through my soul"); women taken as lovers (not fond recollections), and the first woman with whom he found love. Heavy with metaphor throughout, the "Healing" in the title no doubt resonates with the poem's epicenter: the falling in and falling out of love with his wife, a process steeped in contradictions as much as self-indulgence. The poems, correspondingly, are intensely personal, contradictory and completely forthcoming: "At the airport on the floor with my laptop writing you love poems/ you'll never have a love like mine, Lisana, ever." The book begins in the barrio, with an angry teen needing love, and ends in a garage, where the poet muses over the Chicano men who change his tires. Despite the melodrama in between, or maybe because of it, the poet seems reconciled to being himself by the book's end. It is a poem that professes and lives up to its own integrity. (July 10)Forecast:Baca's engagé (and ex-con) reputation, the scope and ambition of this volume and the attention a 12-city author tour will generate for it (and for
A Place to Stand, also from Grove) should make this book appealing to less-regular readers of poetry—a possible breakout, and certainly a breakthrough book for Baca.

July 1, 2001
In his memoir, " A Place to Stand" (see p.1969), Baca describes how he kept journals while in prison, recording the wild flux of emotions his memories and experiences aroused. This penchant for page-therapy, for writing in order to understand life, is the force behind Baca's newest book of poetry, a veritable torrent of confessions and prayers, autobiography and reflection. Baca contemplates all the violence and injustice he has endured, rendering the personal mythological and conflating the gritty with the transcendent. Candid and earthy, he writes of his struggle to reconcile lust-induced fantasies of females with real-life women, and, in a sequence of gorgeous love poems reminiscent of the Song of Songs, charts the rise and fall of a passionate, ultimately archetypal relationship. Baca expresses both bliss and heartache with lyric intensity as he sets his struggle not merely to survive but also to become compassionate and giving within the greater context of Indio-Chicano culture, American history, and the tragedies of poverty and racism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)