Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

Marc Falkoff is an assistant professor at the Northern Illinois University College of Law and attorney for seventeen Guantanamo prisoners. Flagg Miller is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean American poet, novelist, playwright, and human rights activist who holds the Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University.

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable. This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantanamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, "Poems from Guantanamo" brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantanamo, in legal limbo. If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry "forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change," these verses - some originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneys - are the most basic form of the art.