Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande

A romantic and a populist, Jimmy Santiago Baca celebrates nature and creativity: the power of becoming more the river than myself in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande. These poems are an expansive meditation on Baca's spiritual life, punctuated always with his feet--repeatedly, rhythmically--on the ground as he runs every morning along the river. Baca contemplates his old life, his new love, his family and friends, those living and those dead, injustices and victories, and Chicano culture. As Denise Levertov remarked, Baca writes with unconcealed passion and manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythical and archetypal significance of life events.