Baca's brand of poetry is lyrical yet expansive, completely personal yet socially engaged, self-affirming yet generous. His lines are musical, meant to be savored in the mouth and on the ear. The syllables roll out with relish and abandon, but this lack of control is only apparent and conceals their underlying discipline.

Black Mesa Poems, the collection in which this poem appears (see this database), is a powerful statement of Baca's identity--a young Hispanic man from an impoverished family in rural New Mexico--yet in many respects it closely resembles the poetry of that great American writer of Dutch-English extraction, Walt Whitman. Black Mesa Poems is Jimmy Santiago Baca's Leaves of Grass and "Song of Myself." See also the more recent collection, Set This Book on Fire! (Cedar Hill Publications, Mena, Arkansas, 1999).