From his prison cell, where he awaited execution for conspiring to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote 10 powerful poems, charged with white-hot emotions and disarming candor of a man who lived and ultimately died by the truth.

Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani, these poems testify to the courage and the despair, the misery and the hopes of thousands of Iranians struggling to survive conditions of extreme oppression.

Winner of the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize “A powerful work of lyric art.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.

These poems were written in prison, in the depth of night, by the poor light of a peculiar lamp, assembled from an old inkwell, a little alcohol that I smuggled from the sick bay and a wick plaited from the lace of an espadrille. Afterwards when eyes and keys were waking up, I would hide my words in a shoe and while walking in the prison yard, on a circular path that led nowhere, I would memorise the poems, giving them form and harmony...' The Spanish Communist poet Marcos Ana (1920-2016) was Spain's longest serving political prisoner. Captured by Italian troops at the end of the Civil War, he spent the next 23 years in Franco's prisons, often in solitary confinement. In prison he started writing poems, which were smuggled out and published as Poemas desde la cercel (1960). Ana was eventually released in 1961, following an international campaign led by Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yves Montand, Pablo Picasso and Joan Baez. Che Guevara was carrying one of Ana's books when he was executed. Clear, musical, painful and compelling, Poems from Prison and Life is the first English translation of Ana's last book, published when he was 91, in order to 'open a path of fire and rebellion in the hearts and minds of the new generations, in whose furrows we have sown our history.'