This picaresque novel by acclaimed writer Jimmy Santiago Baca follows Orlando Lucero after he is released from a lifetime of imprisonment, first in an orphanage and then in prison, and learns to live on the outside, ultimately finding his way as a writer and artist.

American Book Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca endured decades in the penal system before becoming a renowned poet and a father. In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, 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,...

Jimmy Santiago Baca had little to live for when he entered Arizona State Prison, yet beyond the rage and desperation he found a new center – the quiet strength of poetry – and he blazed its trail with a fire that still burns today.

The story of Jimmy Santiago Baca, "winner of the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award, ... called an heir to Pablo Neruda, ... [who] at the age of twenty-one ... was illiterate and facing five to ten years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs."--Jacket.

“In Jimmy Santiago Baca’s haunting story collection, intricate family dramas . . . play out against the luminous, wide-open backdrop of New Mexico.” —Los Angeles Times
 
In his first foray into short fiction, award-winning poet and memoirist Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the territory where old-world traditions meet new-world ambitions, and characters try to make something of themselves,...

Two Mexican-American brothers--Lorenzo, who becomes a farmer, and Vito, who gains fame as a boxer--take different paths in life after the brutal murder of their mother, only to have their journeys converge and bring them face-to-face with a common enemy.