I Am Offering This Poem

Published in 1979, “I Am Offering This Poem” has garnered much recognition for its sincerity and striking imagery. Poet Jimmy Santiago Baca infuses this love poem with deep knowledge of hardship. Prior to the publication of this poem in his book Immigrants in Our Own Land, Baca spent several years in prison and found his calling as a poet during his time there. In an era when few writers of Latinx and Native American heritage connected with mainstream literary audiences, his work broke through with its frank, vivid depictions of barrios in the American Southwest. Baca now stands alongside many other contemporary Mexican American poets—such as Juan Felipe Herrera and Sandra Cisneros—who have contributed to the canon of essential American poetry.

Poet Biography

Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in 1952 in New Mexico. Abandoned by his parents at an early age, he spent his childhood with relatives and in orphanages, from which he often tried to escape. A poet of Mexican and Apache heritage, Baca has lived in the American Southwest for the majority of his life and often writes about the region in his poetry.

In 1973 Baca went to a maximum-security prison as a young man after being arrested on drug charges.