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    The Esai Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness I
    The Esai Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness I
    The Esai Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness I
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Esai Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness I

    By Jimmy Santiago Baca and Carolyn Forché

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    American Book Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca endured decades in the penal system before becoming a renowned poet and a father. In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, Baca celebrates parenthood and presents, with brutal honesty, the daily complexities of adult life in the age of 9/11 and the Iraq War. This ex-convict, an essential voice in world poetry, chronicles the changes that envelop him upon the arrival of two of his children, Lucia and Esai. After “twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence . . . beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings,” he refuses to give in to evil and despair.

    Recalling the works of other poets who passed through the horrors of extreme experience—Nazim Hikmet, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, Otto René Castillo, and a host of others—The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to one generation’s failings and pass on humane advice to the next. Taken together as Breaking Bread with the Darkness, these two collections offer a poetic primer for paternity, and a model for teaching the young history, politics, spirituality, and survival.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRestless Books
    Release dateOct 12, 2013
    ISBN9780989983228
    The Esai Poems: Breaking Bread with the Darkness I
    Author

    Jimmy Santiago Baca

    Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning poet, internationally known for his lyrical, politically charged verse. Of Apache and Chicano ancestry, at the age of twenty-one he was convicted on drug charges and spent six and a half years in prison, where he found his voice as a poet through correspondence with Denise Levertov of Mother Jones. His many books include the poetry collections C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, Healing Earthquakes, Set This Book on Fire, In the Way of the Sun, Black Mesa Poems, Poems Taken from My Yard, and What's Happening; a memoir, A Place to Stand; a collection of stories and essays, Working in the Dark; a play, Los tres hijos de Julia; a screenplay, for the film Blood In Blood Out; and the novel A Glass of Water. He has published three ebooks with Restless Books: The Face and two Breaking Bread with the Darkness poetry volumes. Baca is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love, and cultural difference. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.

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      Book preview

      The Esai Poems - Jimmy Santiago Baca

      2011

      Preface

      25 In/25 Out

      THE REASON I WROTE THE ESAI POEMS and the other three books that will follow was to celebrate my children, to celebrate taking steps in any direction I wanted, to open any door, to greet the morning sun with prayers and a smile, to plan my day as freely and exhilaratingly as a trapeze artist soaring through the air with no net or anyone to catch me. And now, it’s sort of my anniversary. It is my anniversary. From the age of five to thirty-one I was in the system: from St. Anthony’s Orphanage, to the Detention Center, to Montessa, the gladiator school for adolescents heading to prison, to the Bernalillo County Jail, and finally to Arizona Maximum Security prison in Florence, Arizona. Twenty-five years in the system—brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence. The system. And somehow I managed to get out alive, but not without deep emotional scars and spiritual wounds that continue to haunt me to this day: beatings, shock therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings. I was shot, stomped on, homeless and living on the streets, unschooled, and illiterate.

      I did it. To all of the above horrors I say: I have outlasted you. This September 2010 marks the time that I have been more freer than I have been imprisoned; twenty-five years in the system, twenty-five years and one month out in freedom—working strong and standing with integrity and writing and loving and with family and five kids. Every morning — I mean, every single morning — I rise, I do so with gratitude and love for my breath, for stepping into the kitchen, for tossing up my four-year-old Lucia, for riding bikes with my seven-year-old Esai, for looking out the window and seeing the vast blue sky, and for hugging my wife and running around the fields or up in the foothills. I so, so love

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