Books
“Published annually to give voice to the voiceless.”
Bone Orchard
WRITTEN BY GEORGE T WILKERSON AND ROBERT JOHNSON
“Like all great art, this somberly magnificent book both tells us things beyond our previous imaginings and makes us see familiar things in a different way. Its evocative portrait of everyday existence on death row is full of detail which even lawyers who have represented condemned inmates for decades and often visited with them in prison will find strikingly new and productive of deeper understanding….[T]he oppressions which condemned prisoners particularly bear shine with a rare intensity through the poetry and prose of these pages…”
-Anthony G. Amsterdam, capital defense litigator and University Professor Emeritus, New York University
INTERFACE
WRITTEN BY GEORGE T. WILKERSON
“A generous and compassionate account of a man on death row using poetry to measure what it means, in his own truth-telling, to have spent ‘longer getting / born than being alive’….George T. Wilkerson ushers us into a dark, fertile, and visceral body of aliveness with language that becomes weapon, testimony, penitence, and benediction.”
-Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
CRASS CASUALTIES
WRITTEN BY ANTHONY G. AMSTERDAM
“What we all know - Anthony G. Amsterdam is the great Civil Rights attorney of our time. What many do not yet know - Tony is an equally masterful American poet. These narrative poems are fearlessly truthful and ferociously intelligent, sometimes tragic yet always exquisite, offering insights wide and deep that cross time and illuminate a vast array of subjects… Tony’s voice is stunning and this work will endure.”
-Philip N. Meyer, Professor of Law, Vermont Law School and author, Storytelling for Lawyers
BEHIND THESE FENCES
WRITTN BY E.L.
“In this collection, E.L. reminds us that no matter who we are, or where we are, our words have the power to lay claim to our experiences as human beings. I first met E.L. in the summer of 2016 when I began volunteering at Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Northeast Ohio. While our lives differ in many ways, his writing reminds me of the universal truths that we all face. E.L.’s pieces speak to us through love, hurt, hopes and dreams, and a search for truth and meaning. Let them speak to you.”
CHRISTOPHER DUM, www.id13project.com
“The poems in Behind these Fences sing with authenticity in a heartfelt plea for dignity and freedom from oppression. We are proud to include this book in the BleakHouse collection. “
ROBERT JOHNSON, Editor and Publisher BleakHouse Publishing
PAGAN
John Corley (AUTHOR), Susan Nagelsen (Editor), Charles Huckelbury (Editor)
Drawing on his personal experiences in and out of prison, and an uncanny ability to describe the indescribable, John Corley guides the reader on a walking tour of the light and dark sides of the street, accompanied by a demonstrated intimacy with both.
“John Corley’s seminal work Pagan introduces the lyrics of a mean whose words escape the far distance of Angola. With a range of voices and styles, Corley gracefully embraces both themes of despair and lightness, transcending the dark corners of confinement, introducing him squarely into the firmament of poets.” SHIRIN KARIMI, Author of Enclosures: Reflections from the Prison Cell and the Hospital Bed
Woe to these fences caging us we raging let us free.
Personalities crash and theories collide
masculinity gets confused with ego and pride
Check ins crash outs and fake suicide
I'm not Maya Angelou but still I rise but still I rise.
Look into these eyes there is no we in this team
just so many I's why can't we have a dream
Behind these fences
E.L., Author, Behind these Fences
2018
“With a heavy dose of dark wit, Corley’s Pagan teaches us the difference between escape and liberation. He tackles universal human experiences – a yearning to connect, the mind’s persistent restlessness in an aging body – with a composed clarity so unlike the bleak imagery used to convey them. ”
Books Chronologically Ordered below
SILENT, WE SIT
EMILY DALGO
2016
“Emily Dalgo’s Silent, We Sit is an inspiring debut collection that showcases her masterful prose and wise reflection. With maturity beyond her years, she remarks on the everyday emotions that cripple and inspire us in poems like “Apathy” and “Afterlife.” Through her wide-ranging narrative voices, Dalgo skillfully paints a picture of the lofty visions of a character’s unrealized future juxtaposed with the humble reality of life. The audience will turn the final page knowing that Dalgo has successfully elevated our perception of humanity.”
“Beautiful, honest work written with heart. Her deft hand shaping vivid imagery, and emotion while still leaving room for the reader to relate to their own experiences. Truly a great read, and highly recommended.”
2014
AN ELEGY FOR OLD TERRORS
Zoe Orfanos
This collection is indeed an elegy, one that, in lush, sensual tones, bids farewell to old terrors through a rare and revealing embrace of the world one encounters. It is also a manual for thoughtful living that will call to the reader often and should be kept close at hand to save time searching the bookshelves.
UP THE RIVER
CHANDRA BOZELKO
“Chandra Bozelko’s Up the River Anthology projects many voices. But it is Bozelko’s voice that harmonizes the discordant and disconcerting fragments of our criminal justice system. She examines her life as a prison inmate in this riveting poetry collection. Up the River presents a deadly theater. Bozelko writes about personal, damning, damaging experiences through the eyes of the supporting players of prison life. Her characters act out their roles on this rigid, often tyrannical stage. Full of heart, Bozelko’s collection leaves us to wonder not, what did she do? but rather, what have we done?”
“...the poems are riveting as they discuss courtroom and prison experiences from different viewpoints. The verse is candid, downbeat, aware of injustice, and superbly written. You may have never read poems quite like this. Highly recommended.”
2015
BLACK BONE
ALEXA MARIE KELLY
“Alexa Marie Kelly’s new book of poems puts to rest any delusions about race in America, especially with respect to the criminal justice system. She masters the difficult challenge of capturing imprisonment, including executions and suicides, from an exclusively free perspective. Few outsiders can understand a life in which the man or woman never feels safe anywhere, but Kelly eloquently describes it: “The caged heart has no mornings.” Black Bone is disturbing but also necessary if this country is ever to move into a post-racial society and leave behind the perpetual long, dark night of a criminal justice system that values money and power over the individual. It is a tonic to the misinformation one hears during the unending election cycles and a volume that should be on any thinking person’s reading list.”
2013
DISTANT THUNDER
CHARLES HUCKELBURY
“Charles Huckelbury’s collection of poems, Distant Thunder, reminds us all of the duality of life with which human beings are both blessed and cursed. His renderings of life’s core dialectics—pain and recovery, faith and despair, memory and future—point the way to a salvation that rises above the prison walls that confine the human spirit. Huckelbury’s Distant Thunder is a gift to every reader who seeks the dawn beyond the darkest of nights.”
2013
2011
ENCLOSURES
SHIRIN KARIMI
“In this enthralling book of poetry, Enclosures, Shirin Karimi explores suffering and loss among the ill and imprisoned, bringing us to the heart of what it means to be human: in the face of adversity we can either be crushed by the weight of our lives or we can become, if only for a moment, ‘Weightless, like astronauts or angels.” With wisdom and compassion beyond her years, Karimi shows us, with aching beauty, the resiliency of the human spirit in times of great loss.”
2010
A ZOO NEAR YOU
ROBERT JOHNSON
“As I was reading A Zoo Near You, Emily Dickinson’s voice echoed in the background: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Indeed, this is a collection of poetry – full of irony and passion – that will blow off the top of your head and leave you gasping for breath. A master at satire, Robert Johnson (with a chorus of other contributors) takes us on a journey into the ‘belly of the beast’ of our nation’s prisons and shows us how justice and compassion can be as elusive and imaginary as the Loch Ness Monster.”
2009
ORIGAMI HEART
ERIN GEORGE
“Erin George’s Origami Heart: Poems by a Woman Doing Life, is intimate, courageous, and lyrical. The ‘woman doing life’ in Erin George’s stunning first collection is at once a prisoner serving a life sentence and a woman continuing to weave the complex web of severed and ongoing relations that is her life. From the opening, title poem, wrenching in its restraint, George locates the true horror of imprisonment in a mother’s separation from her children. As she folds and unfolds the ‘origami heart’ of her daughter’s much-read letter, the connection between them, like the creases in the paper, is ‘soft, threatening severance, / but still holding.’ Through these poems of memory and longing, Erin George struggles to hold on.”
“Erin is a person, a real live person, who laughs and cries, has a sharp wit, and isn’t afraid to face her dorky white-womaness. She exists, she is not a faceless prisoner. It’s easy to look at prisoners and see faceless jumpsuits with bad attitudes, but there are real lives and real people inside those jumpsuits - or jeans - and Erin puts that life and the soul it belongs to right in front of your nose, and challenges you to deny that she is any different from a woman standing outside the bars rather than inside. She is a mother, a daughter, a wife, a real live person. And once you read what she’s written, you’ll never look at a prison again without wondering what stories are living trapped behind its bars.”
TALES FROM THE PURPLE PENGUIN
CHARLES HUCKELBURY
“We have found our modern day Chaucer in the hands of the poet Charles Huckelbury! Here ‘the baddest bouncer in the / baddest bar’ – Little David, part medieval knight, part ‘Jesse goddamn James,’ part ‘Leonidas before the Persians’ – narrates a series of tales that will leave you laughing and weeping at the spectacle of humanity in all its guises, from bikers to castaways, from strippers to real estate salesmen, from queens to dope fiends. Huckelbury finds poetry in the most surprising of places, and ultimately reminds us how the ‘ache’ of loss keeps us searching for beauty and meaning.”
2008
2007
BURNT OFFERINGS
ROBERT JOHNSON
“Burnt Offerings is a book of original poems by a distinguished criminologist. The book takes the reader on what one male prisoner called ‘an elegiac journey from crime to arrest to confession to trial and ultimately to prison’ (Charles Huckelbury, State Prison for Men, Concord, New Hampshire). ‘Like a surgeon,’ states Erin George, a woman doing time in prison, ‘Johnson deftly exposes the sepsis that is the penal system of our ostensibly progressive society.” And like nothing before it, Burnt Offerings opens “a window onto an alien, forbidding landscape… We are brought into the world of concertina wire and steel, the world of broken men and women longing for human touch and kindness with such power that we are forced to see and feel what Americans have chosen to ignore far too long: we are warehousing humans behind those walls… Burnt Offerings will not be forgotten.”
