In Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, Jimmy Santiago Baca continues his
daily pilgrimage through the meadows, riverbanks, and bosques of the Rio
Grande where winter dies, spring explodes, and inextricable links
between the human spirit and the natural world are revealed--the river
and I see through each other's skins / behind the eyes into the tunnels
of water-bone and rushing marrow. These poems expand upon those in
Baca's recent Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande -- his visions of love
and loss, poverty and renewal, redemption and war are reflected in the
rocks, trees and animals of his beloved New Mexico. In Spring Poems the
words of the river rise around thorny thickets / then descend again into
the burbling stubble, and the poet surrenders himself to this place
where his own words are woven by a thumbnail-sized yellow spider/ with
poppy seed eyes. Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy
Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother, but was later sent
with his brother to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was
after Baca was sentenced to five years in a Federal prison at the age of
twenty-one that he began to turn his life around: there he learned to
read and write and found his passion for poetry. His memoir A Place To
Stand won the prestigious International Award. He is Champion of the
International Poetry Slam and winner of The Before Columbus American
Book Award and the Pushcart Prize.
