Poems from Guantanamo: the detainees speak
edited by Mark Falkoff
University of Iowa Press, 2007
"Many men at Guantanamo turned to writing poetry as a way to maintain their sanity, to memorialize their suffering, and to preserve their humanity through acts of creation."
"...according to the military's own documents, only eight percent of the detainees are even accused of being al Qaeda fighters, only five percent were captured by United States forces on the battlefield of Afghanistan, and fewer than half are accused of committing a hostile act against the United States,"
"Perhaps their poems will prick the conscience of a nation."
from the introduction by MARL FALKOFF
"...in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — 'speak'?"
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