Jimmy Santiago Baca | The Sun Magazine #2

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca found poetry in prison, where he taught himself to read by sounding out the words from an anthology of Romantic poets. Now he rises each morning to read and write in his home in New Mexico.

— From November 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Release

I cannot write how it was. The world shifted me too fast with each event passing before me, inflicting my nerves with flash-bulb rapidity. I was quietly startled at the fresh novelty. Numb still to the fact I was leaving, disbelieving, an embryo in limbo, sins forgiven, the timelessness suddenly and violently meaning something concrete.

February 1979
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