Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration - Paperback

by Diana Marie Delgado (Editor), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Foreword by)

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.

Contributors include: Hanif Abdurraqib, Rhionna Anderson, Brian Batchelor, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Marina Bueno, Cody Bruce, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Natalie Diaz, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nikky Finney, Kennedy A. Gisege, Gustavo Guerra, Jessica Hill, Vicki Hicks, Randall Horton, Sandra Jackson, Catherine LaFleur, Ada Limón, Sarah Lynn Maatsch, Christopher Malec, Eduardo Martinez, John Murillo, Angel Nafis, Kenneth Nadeau, Leeann Parker, James Pearl, Christina Pernini, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Patrick Rosal, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Sin á Tes Souhaits, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Erica "Ewok" Walker, Candace Williams, and SHE/p>

Author Biography

Diana Marie Delgado is a poet, editor, playwright, and author of Tracing the Horse (BOA Editions, 2019) and Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust (Center for Book Arts, 2015). With extensive experience in executive leadership, Delgado is committed to uplifting writers and cultivating vibrant creative communities. She holds degrees from UC Riverside and Columbia University's MFA program in poetry and resides in Tucson, Arizona.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020, and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, among others. Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.