Incarceration Nation speaks from a big heart, an informed mind, and engaged action. The book is large enough to hold the 'hope and terror' required as we investigate prison. Hartnett honors the names and words of real people living their lives behind' bars, includes the speech of those we pay to guard them, shares what his own eyes have seen, and calls on thinkers and poets from Rousseau to Eugene Debs, from Whitman to Peter Dale Scott. There's even room for music. Without avoiding terror, this book uses words like grace, thankful, and joy—human words born from the choice Hartnett has made: to love.
Judith Tannenbaum, poet, teacher, activist, and author of Disguised as A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin Prison In this pathbreaking, painful book, using poetry and personal narratives, Stephen Hartnett issues a call for social justice in America's prison system. Certain to be controversial, this powerful book exposes a side of American life that many wish to keep hidden.
Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Political poetry, even from great artists, is often narrow-focused if not shrill. One of the chief graces of Stephen Hartnett's dazzlingly original book, Incarceration Nation, is the amazing range of subject, mood, thought, and voice within its exploration of America's imprisoning culture. He revives Whitman's vision of America against the countervailing evidence, often by borrowing from prison poets, some grossly over-punished, some never guilty. The suppressed horrors of prison life are intercalated with gruff male humor, compassionate moments with guards, and perspectives from Schelling and Kant. Hartnett does homage to Forché's poetry of witness and Sanders's investigative poetics, but more than either, his is a poetry of engagement, of vision becoming practice. This is a major achievement, with promise of more to come.
Peter Dale Scott, University of California, Berkeley