SOURCE: Review of Healing Earthquakes: A Love Story in Poems, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 25 (18 June 2001): 78.

In the following review, the unsigned critic comments favorably on the “intensely personal, contradictory, and completely forthcoming” love-inspired poems of Healing Earthquakes.

Building on the achievement of the epic poem Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and his memoirs Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet in the Barrio and the forthcoming A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, World Heavy-weight Poetry Bout champ Baca's new book-length work [Healing Earthquakes] is a sprawling journal of epic proportions. A series of small poems divided among five books, it explores the history of love in the poet's personal relationships: in (and not in) his childhood community (“as I am born again in the suffering of my people”); his mother (“I wanted to suckle them again and crawl up...