Combining a stunning lyrical intensity with a profound exploration of the human soul, Healing Earthquakes uses poetry to conjure a romance, from beginning to end. Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces us to a man and woman before they are acquainted and re-creates their first meeting, falling in love, their decision to make a family, the eventual realization of each other's irreconcilable faults, the resulting conflicts, the breakup and hostility, and, finally, their transcendence of the bitterness and resentment. Throughout the relationship we are privy to the couple's astonishing range of...

A vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity, this award-winning memoir "stands as proof there is always hope in even the most desperate lives" ("Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram").

Black Mesa Poemsis rooted in the American Southwest, the setting of Jimmy Santiago Baca's highly acclaimed long narrative poem, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley(New Directions, 1987). "Baca's evocation of this landscape," as City Papernoted, "its aridity and fertility, is nothing short of brilliant." The individual poems ofBlack Mesaare embedded both in the family and in the community life of the barrio, detailing births and deaths, neighbors and seasons, injustices and victories. Loosely interconnected, the poems trace a visionary biography of place. "

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 over two million men and women incarcerated in penitentiaries and jails have become America's forgotten population. This extraordinary anthology of autobiographical prison writings brings the reader inside their silent and hidden world.

Culled from more than four hundred submissions nationwide, the thirty-six pieces here represent works by a broad spectrum of prisoners: young and old, unknown and infamous, minimum security check forgers and death row inmates. The authors include notorious "Preppie Murderer" Robert Chambers; an elderly truck driver who strangled the woman he professed...