The Prisons, Maggie Jaffe's most recent poetry collection, is hard to read, as the bleakest truths often are.   The book is also hard to put down for the same reason, because this is the unexpurgated truth of the American prison system.   These poems leave your nerve endings singed by the recognition that the collective American psyche has not merely warped unto madness, which the penal system represents at multiple levels, but that we have rationalized that madness.   Emblematically, Camus's words from The Fall, "Those who murder the language are not pure either," serve as the epigraph for Jaffe's book and the reason she is castigating America, for slaughtering meaning by perverting language and images, for allowing language especially to be turned into a weapon of power and commerce, into the mechanism of dissimulation and control.

Which is not to suggest that Jaffe preaches to the reader, but rather that she endeavors to steal both language and images back in the service of humanity, which should perhaps be the primary objective of any poet in our time.   To that end, The Prisons is a collage: artwork by prisoners (their world entire: bars and other inmates); a letter from the Justice Department acknowledging the author's protest of her prisoner-lover's treatment in quintessential bureaucracy-speak (in this instance, a revealing abuse of words); quotations ("The more corrupt the Republic, the more numerous its laws", Tacitus); a bizarre section of California Penal Code outlawing "salacious tattoos" and body piercings (among a long list of things) for prison visitors; and the author's powerful poems about prisoners and their visiting loved ones, the bleakness of prison life, the capricious power of the state, and the suppression of art and artists through history (from Native Americans to Salvadoran poets).   These elements add up to a harsh and bone-jarringly real portrait of a civilization rotting.   In "Babel" the poet is "forced to leave [her imprisoned lover] / after one hour, [and] heading west to Sacramento," she says,

        . . .the fields [are] on fire
        with western meadowlarks and road
        signs touting a politician, tough on crime
        and favored to win. The jet lifts off. . .
        The woman next to me opens
        her Book of Revelations; others flip
        through magazines or twist off bottle caps.

This is a picture of the garden in decay, birds singing over the twisted wreckage of the culture as reflected in the incarceration of the speaker's lover for non-violent property crimes stemming from an insatiable heroin addiction, as reflected in all of the other prisoners in Jaffe's poems who are where they are because of the ill-conceived war on drugs (mandatory minimums and three strikes laws), or because a drug deal went sour, or because they merely can't conform; but the picture of America this poem offers is ultimately worse than some self-fulfilling prophecy of the end-time, because the end is so unspeakably banal.

There are no heavenly beings locked in battle with the forces of evil, and there is no mythically grotesque beast to point our blood-smeared fingers at as it stamps our foreheads indelibly.   In the endless postmodern manipulation of archetypes in the service of confusion and control, the beast of the apocalypse becomes our fellow human beings.   And out of fear we select someone, a hero who, as in a perverse mediaeval fairy tale, will throw these "beastly" manifestations, upon whom we have projected all our societal ills, into dungeons in our name.   The people are sacrificed in the people's name as it were, in a perverse ritual that will not save us (quite the contrary).   In this macabre syllogism, the politician trades human lives for the populace's complacency born of their false sense of security.   And nature is merely the embattled backdrop, too weakened in our imagination (if not reality) to deserve even trope status.   But a speaker in one of Jaffe's poems is right.   She tells him, "In Kafka's 'Penal Colony / the imagined crime is indelibly scratched / onto the penitent's back: Vietnam's like that. / No, Cowboy says, that's just a metaphor. / Vietnam was worse."   And, indeed, the situation in America as reflected by the burgeoning penal system is far worse than any linguistic exercise could render.   Consequently, the poems in The Prisons are not offered up for interpretation in any traditional literary sense because the mere portrayal is almost more than we can stand.   Taken as a whole, the book as collage is a compendium of the shifting, frequently perverse (but unrecognized as such) images that are American life deftly juxtaposed with prisoners' drawings and Jaffe's politically charged poems to make the reader think about his or her daily world differently.

The heartless and ultimately sinister nature of an online ad for clothing manufactured by prisoners, which features an electric chair and the hook "Sometimes our jeans last longer than the guys who make them," or the multiple levels of irony in prison-chic toilet fixtures advertised for $1000 go unrecognized amid the daily onslaught of seemingly frivolous images; but surrounded by poems with real prisoners in them, by drawings of stainless-steel prison toilets in context, these attempts to trivialize the sanctity of human beings are worse than absurd.   They become frightening examples of how degraded (and deranged) the culture has become.

The most blatant example of the poet's method is also the most horrifying.   A poem in which a Salvadoran union organizer's children are beheaded, then placed around the dinner table for their mother to find when she comes home, is opposite the government's denial of any knowledge of such acts.   A handprint across the page simultaneously blots out the official lies and evokes the bloody hand that wrote them.

As I told you, this book is hard to read, but there are unabashed positives that rise from Jaffe's deft juxtapositions, too.   For example, the penal code mentioned previously is opposite a poem in which the poet flaunts her "salacious" feminine being in the prison visiting room, and by extension she defies the attempt to make us all desireless drones in the service of the status quo.   But most radically, and most importantly perhaps, the poet gives back faces and human voices to the prisoners that the penal system so desperately needs to be faceless and voiceless in order to ensure its own survival, that the culture needs to be anonymous and silent (like any good scapegoat) in order to justify our inability to evolve.

I would like to believe that the very existence of a book like The Prisons is a sign we are ready for a more humane, more sane vision of our collective being, but the book also reminds us of the scope of our communal illusion æ and thus how invidious it is.   The eponymous poem opens opposite a simple line drawing of a prisoner being interrogated.   He is half-naked, his hands tied, and he is blindfolded.   The drawing is by a Salvadoran, but the inhumanity portrayed could take place anywhere in the world, including the United States, because the concept of prison and all the darkness it entails are universal in the modern world.   And, ultimately, Jaffe is questioning the very idea of prison in this book.

The first stanza of the poem tells us that Giovanni Piranesi, an 18th century architect, thought of a prison as "a machine invented to change people," and thus his drawings feature labyrinths of walls and bars but lack any representation of the incarcerated.   The point is the edifice, the mechanism, that it has a "life" of its own which is its function as rationalized by the culture, and the flesh and blood prisoners are tangential.   They are obviously behind the rock and steel of the etching by Piranesi that separates the second and third stanzas of the poem, but they are invisible to the world except as they are represented by the monolith itself.   Out of sight and out of mind, taken care of, put away, gone.

Tellingly, however, the second stanza is the verbatim recorded message that precedes a collect call (the only kind they are allowed) from a prisoner.   The recipient is invited to either accept the charges or to press the pound key, "if you never wish to receive calls from this facility again."   We can forget the people in prison because the prison as rationalized function allows us this option, easy as pressing a button, but the prisoners are still there, still trying to communicate with those outside, asking us to recognize them as human.

A prisoner as by-God human being shows up in the third stanza, but as sacrifice: the speaker's lover chained inside a van that will take him away "for the crime / of mainlining good / drugs and the American / Dream, that fucked-up twisted / sister, that gap-toothed white / picket fence."   In short, the prison is but part of that larger system, of capitalism, of America, and prisoners the detritus; but they breathe there, think, and believe, and brood there, and they long for loved ones.   The prisoner in this stanza could be you or me if we step to a rung too far down the ladder, if we grow desperate, if we give our fellows reason to not want to look at us because we represent the cost of their comfort or the darker side of commerce.   In the final stanza the poet tells us outright, the prison is indeed a "Machine to change people/ Which is why I want my Prisons as finely / etched as Paranesi's. / What else do I want? / To speak without electronic surveillance / and a guard who permits me to touch him."   What Jaffe wants, beyond the touch of her lover, is freedom for us all and to tell us the truth, that we are not free as long as so many are in jail.   In the wake of recent legislation to increase police power that proponents say is for our own good, in the wake of polls that indicate that 65% of the American people would willingly surrender some of their civil rights to combat terrorism, Maggie Jaffe is insisting we reconsider, that we in fact rethink the entire concept of prison, that we put ourselves in that bleak place via her poems and cringe with recognition.

Michael McIrvin is the author of several books of poetry, including Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New, to be published in January 2002, and a book of criticism, Whither American Poetry.   J-Press Publishing published his first novel, Déjà vu and the Phone Sex Queen, in November 2001.