SOURCE: Seaman, Donna. Review of Healing Earthquakes: A Love Story in Poems, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Booklist 97, no. 21 (July 2001): 1971.

In the following review, Seaman illuminates Baca's confessional, autobiographical and “ultimately archetypal” poetic record of love in Healing Earthquakes.

In his memoir, A Place to Stand …, Baca describes how he kept journals while in prison, recording the wild flux of emotions his memories and experiences aroused. This penchant for page-therapy, for writing in order to understand life, is the force behind Baca's newest book of poetry, a veritable torrent of confessions and prayers, autobiography and reflection. Baca contemplates all the violence and injustice he has endured, rendering the personal mythological and conflating the gritty with the transcendent. Candid and earthy, he writes of his struggle to reconcile lust-induced fantasies of females with real-life women, and, in a sequence of gorgeous love poems reminiscent of the Song of Songs, charts...