A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet
By: Jimmy Santiago Baca / Narrated By: Jackson Gutierrez
Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
Brutal yet ultimately beautiful
I dunno—usually I listen to books about ex-cons who have somehow made it out of the muck and the mire, and I feel a little bit of exasperation. I just canNOT stand living through their poor choices as I listen along, my toes curling, screeching, “Noooo! Don’t do that!” even though I very much understand that from where they come, options are a luxury.
So I was quite prepared for some toe-curling listening when I started A Place to Stand… And I wasn’t too far wrong. After all, it’s about Jimmy Santiago Baca’s complete turnaround from living as an illiterate criminal to becoming a poet. But the way he describes his wretched childhood where dad once had potential but became a drunk, to his mother trying to pass for White and abandoning her four children. Add to that grandparents living rurally, his happiest time of life, but grandpa dies so he’s sent to an orphanage, can’t stand it, is sent to a detention center? Holy cow, the perfect storm of cruddy childhoods. When he scoots from the detention center and tries to make it on the street, that’s done by selling drugs, being tough. But I dunno, maybe it’s because the man is a poet, it all becomes quite touching instead of hard-hitting and hopeless. And even though he sells drugs, the whole time he’s desperately trying to live his life within the constraints of the law. It’s just that Life throws him a lot more than he can handle; five years in prison to be exact.
Once there, Jimmy discovers how dehumanizing prison can be. He doesn’t want any trouble, but to protect himself, he must strike out first, violently attacking just to stay safe within the walls. There is no escape, and he’s branded as a trouble maker, visits just about every form of lock up from Solitary to the Dungeon.
A letter from a well-meaning Christian gentleman turns his life around. Though he can’t read, he goes over the letter time and time again, sounding out letters, turning them into words he can understand. In this book, he gives us listeners the opportunity to suss out just how unfortunate his early attempts at writing the gentleman back are. But the world has suddenly opened wide open, and instead of being broken in Solitary? Well, he escapes into happier memories of being a child with loving grandparents, playing without care; it’s a time before being brown became a handicap.
I very much liked the way the writing, though it starts off well enough indeed, really morphs into some of the most lyrical prose there is as he discovers his calling as a poet. Prison and the people within become beautifully flawed. And there is hope and dignity that is discovered along the way.
I appreciated Jackson Gutierrez’s delivery as he conveys fear, earnestness, pride all with an effortless ease. I truly thought I was listening to Baca reading it himself as Gutierrez seems to know the text forward, backward, all the way around; he stumbles over nothing, and you feel a young man coming to life after struggling for so long.
I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I did, but it was my favorite audiobook of the week, and I enjoyed the writing so much, the narration so much, that the 9+ hours simply flew by.
And who knows? Maybe I’ll even mosey on over to the Kindle Store to see if it ever goes on sale as an ebook. Cuz truly?
It’s just that beautifully written.
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