The Face: Baca

By Jimmy Santiago Baca

"Brimming with intolerable rapture, I almost killed myself many, many times. I wasn’t trying to; my love for life just kept spilling me over boundaries into places from which some people don’t come back. Hardly restricted by social convention, I hurt myself by being so rambunctious and romantic."

How much of our past does our face betray? What future fortune can you read in the lines and skin? What trace is left by other lips and fingers and fists? In this beautiful, boisterous account, by turns soul-searching and erotic, acclaimed Chicano and Native American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca reveals the story of his life as told through his face. An orphan, a runaway, and an inmate in a maximum-security prison before he became a world-renowned writer, Baca’s life has been touched with rapture and despair, passion and purgatory. “In my eagerness to thrust forth and excel in life,” Baca writes, “I found fame in all the wrong places.”

Presented by Restless Books as part of an ongoing series of succinct essays featuring some of the world’s most distinctive voices, this installment of The Face is Baca’s meditation on the different faces we show the world, and the ways in which the world marks us with its joys and sorrows. With echoes of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, Baca speaks for a people alienated by history, in search of their own recognizable faces. The Face is the record of a lasting quest for self-recognition by one of our most distinguished poets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989983211

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.

Book preview

The Face

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Restless Books | Brooklyn, New York

Table of Contents

The Face

About the Author

Colophon

The Face

Ever since my infancy, when my biological mother and father abandoned me, I’ve felt that my face was the end product of cosmic parenting. As a child, when I stood in a field chilled with morning mist, looked up at the moon reflected on blackbirds in the cottonwoods, and thought the loneliness in my heart to be too overbearing for me to go on living another day, the vast wholeness of life made my face feel it was being gazed down upon by attentive galactic spirits.

I imagine my face as a hike into the forest, where in early March the winter snow melts and glistens down the black-leaf path, where my boot prints carve themselves deep into the moist soil next to wild turkey prints and, here and there, mountain lion and deer prints.

I see a resemblance to my face in the pink and red cliffs, the dark granite bluffs and smooth open mesas and basins where bears snuggle in caves and sleep during the winter. In almost every aspect of nature, I see parts of my face. My lips in the creek. Forehead on the high peaks. Brown eyes in the sunlight that spreads evenly and softly over the treetops and fields. My graying temples in the patches of lingering snow on the north-facing slopes of pine-forested mountains.

You might not see this image as I pass you on the street, but your eyes would deceive you, my friend. If you want to see my true face,