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.

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.'

These poems came from a place within a Finnish man's mind, to escape the walls of confinement. They reflect the turmoil within the prison, and to look back at the peace and tranquility of a former life. I was an "outsider," and not in the good graces of the "jailer". Therefore, the only thing I could do, was to rely on my Finnish mind. The Finnish term for survival is called "Sisu". They had my broken body, but not my mind.

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a trial and eventual execution. Remarkably during that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, Bukharin wrote four book-length manuscripts by hand in his prison cell. Seventy years later, The Prison Poems is the last of the four prison manuscripts, which include How It All Began: The Prison Novel and Socialism and Its Culture, to be published, allowing readers to grasp Bukharin's vision in its full extent. Bukharin organized the nearly 180 poems in this volume, written from June to November 1937, into several series. One dealing with forerunners to the 1917 Russian Revolution and another focusing on the Russian Civil War contain commentary not found in the other prison manuscripts. The same is true of the "Lyrical Intermezzo" poems for and about Anna Larina, his young wife, from whom he was separated by his imprisonment. This first English translation of Bukharin's Prison Poems is a compelling read, evidencing the powerful intersection of politics and art.