"Jimmy Santiago Baca, winner of the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award, has been called an heir to Pablo Neruda and one the best poets in America today. At the age of twenty-one, however, he was illiterate and facing five to ten years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs. Five years later he emerged from prison with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry.

A Place to Stand is his memoir of childhood on small farms in New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under harrowing conditions behind bars."--BOOK JACKET.