The Face

In this haunting meditation, interspersed with beautiful poems, poet and activist Jimmy Santiago Baca reflects on how the wounds of his past are represented in his passionate face, both the one he knows intimately, but the public face he sometimes has difficulty recognizing. His journey from abandonment to incarceration to stardom as a world-famous poet is engraved in his expressions, and in what is hidden behind them. With echoes of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, Baca's words speak for a people alienated by history, in search of their own recognizable faces. The Face is the record of a lasting quest for self-recognition by the nation's preeminent Chicano and Native-American poet.