“A Place to Stand is about place in the largest, most flexible sense of the term: as home, but also as the soil of one’s roots and as the literary pantheon into which one fits. In that sense the book belongs to the subgenre of prison tales for which the twentieth century was fertile ground . . . from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Vaclav Havel’s diaries . . . [Baca is a poet who] travels outward and inward as a Chicano in America, with all the complications that the identity entails . . . a poet in control of his craft . . . whose voice, brutal yet tender, is unique in America . . . one worth paying attention to. [A Place to Stand] is a luminous book that is at once brave and heartbreaking . . . a thunderous artifact.”
“Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted ‘doing time’ into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca’s harrowing story will stand among the world’s most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.”
