Book Reviews
Elegant and gripping.... The velocity of Baca's transformation through literature is breathtaking.
Los Angeles Times
A wild ride through poverty and alcoholism, abandonment, and orphanage scenes from Dickens.... A Place to Stand is a hell of a book, quite literally. You won't soon forget it.
San Diego Union-Tribune
A Place to Stand is an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit.... A benchmark of Southwestern prose.
Arizona Daily Star
At once brave and heartbreaking.... A thunderous artifact...by a poet whose voice, brutal and tender, is unique in America.
Nation
Worth reading from both a literary and a social perspective, this book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
While readers may find Baca's poetry more dazzling than this prose memoir about how he became a poet, the author still manages to capture both the reader's interest and sympathies. Baca traverses his life, starting with his childhood in rural New Mexico where both parents essentially abandoned him his adolescence in "juvee" halls and his days as a drug dealer. The story leads up to an account of five years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona, and the unusual personal transformation that occurs there through his learning to read and write; eventually, he discovers his poetic voice. The text is structured like a conversion narrative in which Baca's past symbolizes all that is unhealthy and his poetry-oriented future is filled with the hope and optimism that come from discovering something divine in the midst of darkness. The darkness is often literal, as when Baca is describing his lengthy solitary confinements. He also recounts the intricacies of prison politics, in which failure to gain respect and alliances forged with the wrong people can mean death. Oddly, certain story lines are simply dropped along the way, such as his charge that the prison was lacing his food with strong psychoactive drugs. It is too bad that Baca's prose is frequently flat ("Poetry enhanced my self-respect. It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for life's enrichment that I follow to this day"), especially when reflecting upon abstract topics, since the content of his story is so interesting and his poetry simply shines. Forecast: Baca has won a Pushcart Prize, among other awards, including his title as a one-time champion of the International Poetry Slam.
Publishers Weekly
Poetry seems antithetical to the poverty, racism, and violence that wracked Baca's tragic youth, but the power of language is what kept him alive and sane while he served hard time in a hellish federal prison. Now a prizewinning poet and screenwriter, Baca, born in New Mexico in 1952, was abandoned by his parents and put in an orphanage at age seven. He learned to fight but not to read and, in spite of good intentions, ran into nothing but trouble. Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted "doing time" into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca's harrowing story will stand among the world's most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.
Library Journal
A mercifully brief memoir of the Pushcart Prize—and American Book Award-winning Hispanic poet's criminal past, and his agonizingly slow discovery of the redemptive power of writing while serving a prison term. Born in New Mexico as the third child of an alcoholic father and philandering mother, Baca (Black Mesa Poems) was handed off at seven to his grandparents when his father disappeared and his mother ran off with another man-only to find himself in an orphanage when his grandfather died shortly thereafter. Early efforts at schooling failed, and the marginally literate Baca ran away and experimented with criminal behavior. Without any strong role models, fruitful employment, or defenses against anti-Hispanic bigotry, Baca, unusually strong for his youth, developed a vicious proficiency at streetfighting and deliberately resisted attempts by occasional benefactors to set him straight. When he discovered that his first lover was unfaithful to him, Baca drifted to California, where he was fired from his job as an unlicensed plumber after he refused the sexual advances of a housewife. In Arizona, a life as a drug dealer soon landed him a five-year sentence in Florence State Prison—an overcrowded, maximum-security facility where Baca turned to books as an escape and began writing angry, bitterly ironic poetry to purge himself of emotional turmoil. "I am Healing Earthquakes," he writes in one of his early poems, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." After he was released, his attempts at reaching a reconciliation with surviving family members ended in horror when a brother died from alcoholism and his stepfather murdered his mother and then killed himself. Baca finally married, clinging to the love of his wife and his poetry "to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one." A brutally unflinching look back at a dead-end youth that became a crucible for vivid and vital art.
Kirkus Reviews