Caged

Brandon Dean Lamson teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of two poetry books, Houston Gothic (LaMunde Press, 2008) and Starship Tahiti (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and Prairie Schooner, and he was recently the Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Part I: Falling The Weapons Board 3 Killer Inside 5 Island Bound 12 Brujo 18 Horizon 21 Queen of Cups 24 Stray Cats 27 Burning 30 Antigone 34 Hellfire Club 38 The Seagull 41 Apollo Kids 44 Part II: The Labyrinth The Minotaur 49 The Sweet Science 51 Demon Weed 54 Windows 63 Maximum 66 Solitary 71 Red, White, and Blue 75 Native Son 79 Knockdown 82 Mistress Evil 84 Paris and Birdlegs 88 The Duck Game 92 Part III: Submerged Devil Mountain 97 Island Holidays 103 Redpath 109 The Cove 112 Pink Leaves 118 Strong and White 121 Yard Blues 124 Lost Dali 127 Hoops 132 The Voice 137 Do-Over 142 Atlantis 145 Epilogue 151 Acknowledgments 155

Notorious enough to be nicknamed Torture Island, Rikers Island, home to one of the world's largest correctional and mental institutions, has been the subject of our culture's collective fascination for decades. I guarantee after you read Brandon Dean Lamson's memoir Caged - A Teacher's Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur, you will never see that facility, nor prison education, kink, mindfulness, Richard Wright, or shame in quite the same way. On Rikers, as Lamson writes, "there were multiple literacies, various grids laid over the prisoners' words and their worlds." This book guides us through those hybrid, polylingual, even non-verbal languages with an ethnographer's eye and the rawness of reportage--from gang slang to institutional speech and literary allusion--always implicating the narrator in the narration, so that we are made complicit in the realization that prison education itself is a form of control and how solitary confinement is a kind of panopticon in reverse. As the men around him wrestle demons, Lamson's stares down his own minotaur by confronting the violence in his own past with an unflinching poet's heart that transforms trauma into beauty and fear into forgiveness. Caged is a potent lyrical reminder of the daily work that remains for each of us to do.---Dr. Ravi Shankar, Pushcart prize winning author of Correctional As if unconsciously riffing on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s idea that all members of a society are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," Brandon Lamson finds himself haunted in ways that echo the confinement of his prisoner students at Rikers Island. Between the lines of this searing exploration of how class, color and sexual torsion twists men into being lurks a pervasive and persuasive suggestion that prisons are as contagious as viruses, that the conditions built in brick and stone for one section of a society migrate as if airborne. Lamson's brave and gripping confessions in Caged trace how, in King's words: "Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." Possibly counterintuitive in a culture that shouts about experience as a privately owned property, as if walking around the back of the mirror--the fairest indeed--we call self-interest, Caged whispers that the real conditions of the world are shared no matter what.---Ed Pavlic, author of Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners