My review of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Glass of Water at INDenverTimes.

I’ll admit that it’s more than likely impossible for me to give an objective review of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s debut novel, A Glass of Water.  I have been a devoted fan of his poetry for almost a decade, ever since I first readImmigrants in Our Own Land on the recommendation of a family member.  Baca’s poems are both refreshingly direct and grimly lyrical, constructed of the kind of startling concrete images which you can, as a poet friend of mine once put it, almost walk on.  Recently, while reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I kept thinking of Baca’s work as an example of the “visceral realist” poetic movement which The Savage Detectives chronicles but never provides examples of – something which, I’m pretty sure, is fair to neither Bolaño nor Baca.

The rest.