Download A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet AudioBook Free

Jimmy Santiago Baca has been called an heir to Pablo Neruda and one of the best poets in America today. At age 21, however, he was illiterate and facing five to 10 years in a maximum-security penitentiary for advertising drugs. Five years later, he surfaced from prison having the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A Place to Stand is his memoir of years as a child on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence put in in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a medication dealer in NORTH PARK and Arizona, and his incredible personal change under the harrowing conditions behind pubs. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca details the extreme actions he previously to take to survive, from beating another inmate with a business lead tube to slicing an attacker's stomach with a butcher's knife. Although they were functions of self-defense, they arrived him consistently in solitary confinement. His time in isolation was designed to break his heart, but it became the catalyst for a fantastic series of memories and revelations that endowed him with an indomitable will to avoid the dehumanization of prison life. Poetry became an important element of this newfound sense of home, and the function of writing offered a robust method of transcending his environment. A Place to Stand is a vibrant family portrait of life in the maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's heart in overcoming the most brutal adversity.

Category: Authors