Like a Hammer

Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration is more than a poetry anthology: it is a primer on prison abolition. The book opens with a foreword by scholar, author, and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, shedding light on the suffocating walls, the slow passage of time, and the countless cruelties people endure when living behind bars. Each piece that follows adroitly braids personal narratives with analysis and commentary on the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing disruptions and cracks in a legal system that appears unchangeable. The poetry and artwork in these pages have the power to upend dominant narratives, shine light on injustices, and act as a fulcrum around which to organize communities in support of change. Contributors to the anthology include established and recognized poets like Natalie Diaz, Randall Horton, and Patrick Rosal, and poets as yet stifled on the inside including Brian Batchelor and Christopher Malec. Alongside them ring the voices of the people and artists who love them.

Edited and introduced by poet Diana Marie Delgado, whose first interaction with the police was at eight years old when she was arrested with her family, Like a Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a different future. This anthology insists that no society should rely upon the threat of violence, brutality, and banishment as a response to loneliness, sadness, hunger, and despair. Refusing the "common sense" notion that some among us "deserve" the cruelty and isolation of imprisonment, these poems affirm that those incarcerated have revelatory things to say about life, love, politics, power, and our world (and what to do about it)--if only we would listen.

Like A Hammer is an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America's incarceration system.

These powerful poems of witness seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing cracks in a criminal punishment system that too often appears unchangeable. The impacts of that system reverberate through lives and across generations. The poets gathered here aim to foreground the real experiences of people touched by the system, to upend dominant narratives, shine light on injustice, and act as a fulcrum around which to organize communities in support of change.

Like a Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a better future.