It came at the end of a letter.

As NIU’s associate professor of law, Marc Falkoff, read the letters written by his clients, who happen to be two detainees in Guantanamo Bay detention facility, he noticed poems attached at the end of them.

Intrigued, Falkoff asked his colleagues if they had received similar poems. They had, but Falkoff didn’t realize what they were doing until later.

“They were trying to help me understand what life is like in Guantanamo,” Falkoff said.

Falkoff is the editor of “Poems of Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak,” an anthology containing 22 poems written by 17 detainees. Thus far, none of the authors have been charged and seven have been released.

Mark Van Wienen, associate professor of English, said the poems are both private and public.

“They speak very movingly about isolation and despair,” Van Wienen said. “They are also poems that try to rally whatever psychological resources the individual can muster to face the circumstances they face.”

On the other hand, Van Wienen said the poems have a public dimension, in that some ask “tough and bitter questions” of Americans about their detention.
The idea to make the book came gradually.

No detainee has stood trial, so Falkoff thought they could try another venue to be heard. But to make the poems public, Falkoff had to get approval from the Pentagon. The Pentagon checks all papers leaving the naval base, censoring anything they deem as a threat to national security.

Falkoff said the Pentagon began to clear poems, but stopped when it found out Falkoff planned to publish them.

Only poems OK’d by the Pentagon were published.

Reaction to the book has been mostly positive. Meghan O’Rourke, literary editor of Slate magazine, commended the compilation in a review for its humanization of the poems’ authors.

“What makes it interesting is not so much the literary virtues of the poems – some are quite artful, while others are less accomplished — as the way the poems restore individuality to those who have been dehumanized and vilified in the eyes of the public,” O’Rourke said in the review.

However, the book has received criticism. In a review that Falkoff described as “perverse,” poetry author Dan Chiasson, writing for the New York Times Book Review, suggested the poems had been twisted by the Pentagon to serve its goals.

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