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""Forgive state poet #289-128 / for not scribbling illusions / of trickery as if timeless hell / could be captured by stanzas / alliteration or slant rhyme," remarks the speaker, Maryland Department of Corrections prisoner {#289-128}, early in this haunting collection. Three sections-{#289-128} Property of the State, {#289-128} Poet-in-Residence (Cell 23), and {#289-128} Poet in New York-frame the myriad ways in which the narrator's body and life are socially and legally rendered by the state even as the act of poetry offers the hope of reclaiming an identity. These poems address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell. In the tradition of Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Etheridge Knight's The Essential Etheridge Knight, {#289-128} challenges the language of incarceration-especially the ways in which it reinforces stigmas and stereotypes. Though {#289-128} refuses to be defined as a felon, this collection viscerally details the dehumanizing effects of prison, which linger long after release. It also illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not"-- Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Property of the State -- Animals -- Arrest Warrant -- Don't Trust the Process -- The Making of {#289-128} in Five Parts -- Sorry This Not That Poem -- Rhetorical, Perhaps -- .OR. This Malus Thing Never to Be Confused with Justice -- Escorting the Criminal Justice Advocate through State Prison -- Counterproductive Definitions within the Criminal Justice System (1) -- Nothing as It Seems -- Unreliable Narrator -- Roxbury Correctional Book Club -- How to Become the Invisible Man -- Quiet Before the Storm in the Dayroom When Your Silence Will Not Save You -- Imagination Running Wild- -- Black Male Privilege -- Before the Beauty .or. How Could U Forget? -- Poet in New York -- Remember -- {#289-128}-Still Invisible, Too -- A Primer for Surviving a Traffic Stop -- Americans in Times Square -- On the Hudson River at Piers Park -- Riverside Drive State Park -- Randy Weston's African Rhythms Concert, the Day After (for Sally Ann Hard Alex Blake) -- Beware of the Bandleader -- Ars Poetica (3): Stay Woke -- Subway Chronicles -- Walking with Ghost in Harlem -- Ars Poetica (1): Art as Propaganda -- After Ruin When Bullets Miss but Memory Lives -- Counterproductive Definitions within the Criminal Justice System (2) -- Poet in Residence (Cell 23) -- On Reflection -- Aesthetic Beauty I Remember I Think -- Photograph of My Girl Winter on 135th and Broadway Taped to the Wall -- In a Dream the Silent -- But She Wasn't from My Geographical Location -- Dear Etheridge (2) -- Abracadabra -- Trouble the Water -- When the Government Doesn't Love You (the Eighties) -- Open Air Market on Herkimer & Nostrand, Brooklyn (1989) -- 1990 (a Forecast) -- Sex Workers on Smoke Break 1994
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