Böcker av Mark Dow

Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising opens when a boy opens his eyes to his mother's already-inescapable presence. It ends with the possibility of endlessness when the mother touches her own pregnant belly and "for the first time he knows she knows he is there."David Rosenberg (author of A Literary Bible and co-author with Harold Bloom of The Book of J) writes that Plain Talk Rising "transmutes poetry into prose, and then back again, like an alchemist let loose in a writing workshop that may set alight our era of MFA's for good."The New Haven Review says that Plain Talk Rising is "able to make us feel our lived-in time and a kind of eternal time. . . . Dow's brilliant wordplay is equal to the stringent -- and playful -- task he sets himself."  Sentences, stanzas, lines, words, and even individual letters are forms which "make a man feel trapped and free." Syntax touches and delineates objects, ideas, and emotions evenly. "What's most invisible's the main thing, after all.""Does everyone fight something without form, / something formless, I mean, something parsed / to powder mistaken for nothing while meanwhile / slipped above the radar and re-forming itself on / a wider perimeter, formlessness notwithstanding, / or is that just me?" Before being "self-published," Plain Talk Rising was a finalist in the Colorado Prize, New Issues, and Yale Series competitions. It was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.Read more about the book on the Agni blog ("Dick Talk," Sept. 3, 2018).Dow's poems and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of print and online journals, including  Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Fascicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Paris Review, Pequod, PN Review, SLAM! Wrestling, Threepenny Review, and 3:AM Magazine.  A graduate of Yale University and the University of California at Irvine, Dow is also the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004).***[Erratum: Some copies of Plain Talk Rising may require the following correction: on p. 14, the penultimate line of the second stanza should read:  ". . . To remember and forget are not two opposite acts here".] 

Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country. American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States-including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority. American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.