By Alex Avila Anne Lewis and Laura Varela’s  Un Trip: raúlrsalinas and the Poetry of Liberation  is a short film that shoulders the weight of a lifetime. Clocking in at just under half an hour, it eschews the standard biographical mold and instead works like a piece of music—riffing, circling, and layering image, word, and sound. Its foundation is Salinas’s pivotal 1969 prison poem “Un Trip through the Mind Jail,” written while he was locked inside Leavenworth. The poem, once described in a doctoral dissertation by an Italian scholar as the Chicano equivalent to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," shimmers as the film's jazz-inflected pulse, a way of hearing not just Salinas’s voice but also the eternal echoes of the communities he wrote for. As a cinematic expression, its visual style mirrors this improvisational rhythm. Instead of a neatly ordered chronology, the filmm...