Download C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans AudioBook Free
Jimmy Santiago Baca's brilliantly received memoir, A Spot to Stand, gained him the prestigious International Award and offered a keyhole view into the brutal personal record that designed - and carries on to inform - his natural, incisive speech. In C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, he trains his hallmark lyrical intensity on the dark underbelly of dependency and will take us by using an unforgettable guided tour of the darkest sides of the brutal, unjust world. C-Train is a heartstopping group of episodes from the life span of Dream-boy, a young man who locates himself seduced, and later enslaved, by the siren songs of cocaine. Part paean to the delicious electricity of intoxication, part lament for those helplessly under its electricity, C-Train is a drive its hero, and the reader, struggle to get off. In Thirteen Mexicans, Baca writes of the Chicano community and the gulf between your American desire and American truth. In searing, elegiac vignettes he portrays the natural beauty of life in the barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront the way they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white contemporary society. Giving speech to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca illuminates the most unforgiving landscapes; yet his is a perspective tempered by a looking hopefulness that brings these choices inching toward redemption. Baca's latest achievements will validate his place as one of the nation's leading poets, a poet whose words "heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love" (Garrett Hongo). "[Baca] writes with ... an intense lyricism and this transformative perspective which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events." (Denise Levertov)
