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Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems
Award-winning writer Jimmy Santiago Baca, a vital voice in American poetry, weaves personal and political threads to create a pertinent and poignant narrative infused with vigor and passion, emotional grace and vivid sensory detail. Singing At The Gates is a collection of new and previously published poems that reflect back over four decades of Baca’s life. These are poems that revitalize the national raging against war and imprisonment, celebrating family and the bonds of friendship, heightening appreciation for and consciousness of the environment. A career-spanning selection, it includes his early work as a budding poet, written while serving a five-year prison sentence; poems drawn from Baca’s first chapbook; and recent pieces meditating on the significance of breaking through oppression.
Singing at the Gates displays the breadth and depth of Baca's poetic power—with irreverent charm and disarming freedom of mind and soul. The vital pulse of love abiding in these poems will affirm and reaffirm, for both longtime and newfound readers, his devotion to truth and beauty.
Singing at the Gates displays the breadth and depth of Baca's poetic power—with irreverent charm and disarming freedom of mind and soul. The vital pulse of love abiding in these poems will affirm and reaffirm, for both longtime and newfound readers, his devotion to truth and beauty.
- GenresPoetry
254 pages, Hardcover
First published January 7, 2014
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59 people want to read
About the author
Jimmy Santiago Baca
64 books196 followersJimmy Santiago Baca of Apache and Chicano descent is an American poet and writer.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 3, 2013
collecting poems both new and old, singing at the gates features work from some three decades of jimmy santiago baca's career - including his early chapbooks. the chicano/apache poet was convicted on drug charges and spent time in prison in the mid-70s where he learned to both read and write, so it's unsurprising that his experiences while incarcerated have shaped so much of his writing. baca's poetry is not for the faint of heart, as much of his imagery is raw, direct, and unabashed. melding the intensely personal with the political, the depth of baca's writing is bound to strike more than a few emotional chords. singing at the gates's latter poems are amongst the collection's strongest - with the lengthier "rita falling from the sky" being perhaps the most notable. while overall a solid selection, if uneven at times, selected poems of jimmy santiago baca is a more comprehensive work - demonstrating more fully the breadth of baca's ample poetical skill.
rita falling from the sky (excerpt)
had i words to say what i feel,
the poet in me would tell you
how i passed through cities
cafes and restaurants filled with people
gorging, while two blocks either way
children slept in cardboard boxes and mothers sold their infants;
kings of the land were the drug dealer
driving luxury suvs, cadillacs, and bmws,
sports stars bedding down with fourteen year old girls
movie stars trading money and diamonds for virgins and drugs,
bankers laundering money for corporate gangsters,
no one cares; no one remembers their mother memories,
no one turns to their neighbors in compassion,
it's all blood and greed and lies and betrayals and destruction,
city after city i passed
i saw this, heard and felt it, smelled
gutters with young girls
worming their way around for crack,
saw the black and brown and white thugs
raping and killing and numbing their brains
with shocks of crack,
i paused in front of storefront windows
banked with tvs
and saw the killing in afghanistan and iraq,
saw the twin tower corpses shoveled up,
saw enron and anderson accounting firm and others
rob, steal, lie, cheat and destroy
millions of people's retirement savings,
and you accuse me of being crazy?
September 22, 2019
I love Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry and I was psyched for this book, but it's not quite what the title indicates. I was hoping to revisit some high points from Martin and Meditations on the Valley; Black Mesa Poems; and the two Rio Grande books, but Singing at the Gates concentrates almost exclusively on early work and what were on publication new poems. There's some excellent work and it was fascinating to see Santiago Baca's voice taking shape in the Mariposa Letters, which he wrote from prison. But the sense of the Southwest landscape, central to what I love about him, is relatively thin here. Not the place to start if you haven't already encountered JSB's work.
August 2, 2021
hard to rate because it fluctuates but there are certainly enough wonderful poems in here to justify the read! the long poems at the end shine, as do several of the early ones & some from the middle sections.
November 5, 2013
Jimmy Santiago Baca, an award-winning writer and poet (National Endowment of Poetry Award) does it again. Singing At The Gates is a collection of new and previously published poems that reflect back over four decades of Baca’s life.
This selection of poems includes his early work as a budding poet, written while he was 18 years old and serving a five-year prison sentence, poems drawn from his first chapbook and recent pieces on family, nature and the environment.
"What an achingly beautiful collection this is. So split open, so raw, honest, vulnerable, real. Spanning Baca's life in poetry, you feel the enormity of his heart and intelligence." —Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones and The True Secret of Writing
When I read poetry, it's usually two or three poems at a time. I'm partial to shorter narrative poems that are rich with description and weighty with a single word. My favorite poets are mainly women but sometimes I'm drawn to a poem by a male poet such as Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Baca's voice captured me at his introduction and I didn't want to stop reading until I was exhausted.
"I love the growl of poetry, the staggering crash of idols and the burning of literary pacifiers…writing was for me, everyday-me snatching memories and writing them down before the fire of forgetfulness and trauma relegated them to the dark chambers of amnesia…I take only what I can carry and what is most meaningful to me-and that is the narrative, the story, the poem."
The rawness and vulnerability that Baca writes about in the first half of the collection is so heavy, at times, that my emotional exhaustion came after five or six poems. Many of the poems are viscerally descriptive:
"I wear the moon like yanked out roots
glowing orange
in my heart's fang as I search for secrets
in my life"
Approximately halfway in the collection we come to poems of awakening, growth, family and celebration.
The last third of the collection is from 1998 to present. In Baca's poem "It Makes Sense To Me Know," he writes about his time as a volunteer teacher of reading and writing. He asks the children to write a letter poem about their journey to America and describes a shy little girl asking him to sit on the floor next to her as she stood on a small stage in a bookstore.
"When she uttered that first word/a glint of light sparked across her brown eyes into the world, as if it were/golden/speech without sound. I sat amazed/at the light in her eyes, igniting a memory/in/me--when/I too recited my first poem. The intensity/and/radiance of/a child reaffirmed my original reason for/writing, one I had forgotten along the way./Suddenly/I knew, keeping the light intact,/not teaching writing, not to mold or direct,/just to keep it burning, blowing on the /embers so hope doesn't go out…"
I cannot name one favorite poem but I have a top ten list of Baca's poems because there are so many touching, gripping, slap you upside the head words of poetry in this 254 page collection (for Kindle).
This selection of poems includes his early work as a budding poet, written while he was 18 years old and serving a five-year prison sentence, poems drawn from his first chapbook and recent pieces on family, nature and the environment.
"What an achingly beautiful collection this is. So split open, so raw, honest, vulnerable, real. Spanning Baca's life in poetry, you feel the enormity of his heart and intelligence." —Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones and The True Secret of Writing
When I read poetry, it's usually two or three poems at a time. I'm partial to shorter narrative poems that are rich with description and weighty with a single word. My favorite poets are mainly women but sometimes I'm drawn to a poem by a male poet such as Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Baca's voice captured me at his introduction and I didn't want to stop reading until I was exhausted.
"I love the growl of poetry, the staggering crash of idols and the burning of literary pacifiers…writing was for me, everyday-me snatching memories and writing them down before the fire of forgetfulness and trauma relegated them to the dark chambers of amnesia…I take only what I can carry and what is most meaningful to me-and that is the narrative, the story, the poem."
The rawness and vulnerability that Baca writes about in the first half of the collection is so heavy, at times, that my emotional exhaustion came after five or six poems. Many of the poems are viscerally descriptive:
"I wear the moon like yanked out roots
glowing orange
in my heart's fang as I search for secrets
in my life"
Approximately halfway in the collection we come to poems of awakening, growth, family and celebration.
The last third of the collection is from 1998 to present. In Baca's poem "It Makes Sense To Me Know," he writes about his time as a volunteer teacher of reading and writing. He asks the children to write a letter poem about their journey to America and describes a shy little girl asking him to sit on the floor next to her as she stood on a small stage in a bookstore.
"When she uttered that first word/a glint of light sparked across her brown eyes into the world, as if it were/golden/speech without sound. I sat amazed/at the light in her eyes, igniting a memory/in/me--when/I too recited my first poem. The intensity/and/radiance of/a child reaffirmed my original reason for/writing, one I had forgotten along the way./Suddenly/I knew, keeping the light intact,/not teaching writing, not to mold or direct,/just to keep it burning, blowing on the /embers so hope doesn't go out…"
I cannot name one favorite poem but I have a top ten list of Baca's poems because there are so many touching, gripping, slap you upside the head words of poetry in this 254 page collection (for Kindle).
January 3, 2020
I was new to Baca, but was so captured by his voice, and his story of beginning his writing while in prison. Some of the material was difficult literary-wise, but I really fell in love with his poetry here. I actually don’t think I’ve ever read so much of one poetry book before (I usually tire of the same voice, or frankly don't get it), except maybe for Rumi. (Mind you, they are very different though, haha!). Some real beauty here.
December 12, 2013
I love Baca's poetry! It is so vivid and full of so many beautiful metaphors. I can feel the sadness and the hope in everything that he writes and I want more more more!
October 8, 2020
We need a shoe to be a shoe,
for the poet to describe the foot
inside, the miles walked, the weariness
that seeps into toes, heels, and calf,
the tired dreams those feet lug every day
“The Truth Be Known”
Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a volume of poetry covering four decades of Baca's life as a poet. Baca is of Apache and Chicano descent, abandoned by his parents, and at an early age he took to the streets. He was sentenced to prison for six and a half years on a conviction for drug possession. It was in prison where he learned how to read and write and compose poetry. Once freed from prison he chose to live a solitary life and write.
“I was a hermit – as much as one can be living in the fringe of the city.”
Reading Singing at the Gates is experiencing Baca development as a poet. His earliest works convey the feeling of imprisonment and frustration. The feeling and emotion are there almost as if the poems were written in bold type face. Opening poem is long, twenty-five pages, and seems to have been written in a single sitting, stream of consciousness, moving with a purpose from thought to thought. The poem reads more like a letter more than a traditional poem, and he expresses his thoughts in a what appears to be a primitive form, raw, but expressing complex ideas.
By mid-book the poems take a more familiar and recognizable form. The poems still carry a message. The message is not a pastoral scene or romantic love, but a continuation of a struggle. There is racial and economic standings setting the tone in some poems and war and the environment in others. Heritage plays a role in the long poem “Rita Falling From the Sky.” Rita is a homeless woman from Mexico who spends years in a mental institution in America's midwest because she is assumed to be crazy and incoherent. It is only after a new doctor, from Chihuahua, recognized that she was not babbling but speaking her native tongue of the Raramui Indians that she is released. Her real life struggle mirrors Bacca's.
The poetry here is different from most that I have read. The form is interesting as well as the changes in the voice and form as the author's writing matures. Baca writes a fifteen page introduction to this work, which goes a very long way of explaining to the reader his life and how his writing developed. An unprepared reader may not make it through the first third of the book. This is not because it is poorly written, quite the opposite, but the background information is a sort of Rosetta Stone for his early work. Bacca's work although unconventional is still powerful and moving. Singing at the Gates is well worth the read.
for the poet to describe the foot
inside, the miles walked, the weariness
that seeps into toes, heels, and calf,
the tired dreams those feet lug every day
“The Truth Be Known”
Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a volume of poetry covering four decades of Baca's life as a poet. Baca is of Apache and Chicano descent, abandoned by his parents, and at an early age he took to the streets. He was sentenced to prison for six and a half years on a conviction for drug possession. It was in prison where he learned how to read and write and compose poetry. Once freed from prison he chose to live a solitary life and write.
“I was a hermit – as much as one can be living in the fringe of the city.”
Reading Singing at the Gates is experiencing Baca development as a poet. His earliest works convey the feeling of imprisonment and frustration. The feeling and emotion are there almost as if the poems were written in bold type face. Opening poem is long, twenty-five pages, and seems to have been written in a single sitting, stream of consciousness, moving with a purpose from thought to thought. The poem reads more like a letter more than a traditional poem, and he expresses his thoughts in a what appears to be a primitive form, raw, but expressing complex ideas.
By mid-book the poems take a more familiar and recognizable form. The poems still carry a message. The message is not a pastoral scene or romantic love, but a continuation of a struggle. There is racial and economic standings setting the tone in some poems and war and the environment in others. Heritage plays a role in the long poem “Rita Falling From the Sky.” Rita is a homeless woman from Mexico who spends years in a mental institution in America's midwest because she is assumed to be crazy and incoherent. It is only after a new doctor, from Chihuahua, recognized that she was not babbling but speaking her native tongue of the Raramui Indians that she is released. Her real life struggle mirrors Bacca's.
The poetry here is different from most that I have read. The form is interesting as well as the changes in the voice and form as the author's writing matures. Baca writes a fifteen page introduction to this work, which goes a very long way of explaining to the reader his life and how his writing developed. An unprepared reader may not make it through the first third of the book. This is not because it is poorly written, quite the opposite, but the background information is a sort of Rosetta Stone for his early work. Bacca's work although unconventional is still powerful and moving. Singing at the Gates is well worth the read.
June 11, 2025
These poems reflect 4 decades of the author’s writings, beginning with his first letters after teaching himself to read and write while in prison and moving on to poetry, some of which was commissioned by others. I reread the Author’s Note at the beginning after finishing the book; that was well worth it to gain more insight into what I’d just completed. Many of the poems are very raw, very real. One hard part for me (and I was obviously not the intended audience for these particular poems) was when the author interspersed Spanish words - perhaps sometimes other languages since I couldn’t access translations - into the poems. Some of the poems gave me insight into situations and people I have never imagined, and all I could write about them was, “WOW.” There are poems in this collection that I have marked for rereading, poems that speak to justice, to the good and bad parts of oneself. I’m very glad I picked up this book.
August 23, 2020
This book is raw and telling. Baca’s poetry reflects life experiences foreign to me but in an insightful and enlightening way.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews