Disfigured Hours

B Batchelor writes, with unsparing precision, about life in a cage. "This is not / a gentle place / everything hurt /and hardened / into feral survival." In searing images, Disfigured Hours bears witness to the daily, sometimes hourly, cruelties of America's carceral behemoth. These twenty-four poems - each with sixty syllables, representing the minutes in the hour - offer a record of both human and inhumane moments experienced during more than two decades behind bars. In lyric, haunting, and stark detail, Batchelor conjures not the prison stereotypes we know from pop culture, but the full, textured, inner landscape of those it contains.