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 shaped-and continues to inform-his 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 barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront how they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white society. Giving voice to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca confirms his place as one of the nation's leading poets, whose words heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love (Garrett Hongo). [Baca] writes with . . . an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events. -Denise Levertov [Baca] travels outward and inward as a Chicano in America, with all the complications that the identity entails. . . . [He is] a poet in control of his craft . . . whose voice, brutal yet tender, is unique in America. -The Nation