The Esai Poems

In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, American Book Award winner Jimmy Santiago 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. Despite "twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence," wherein he is faced with "beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings," Baca refuses to give in to evil and despair. The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to the failings of one generation, and pass on humane advice to the next.