In 1844 a Boston minister sat down to end the death penalty by argument alone.Charles Spear gave sixteen essays to the task. He went at the gallows from every side. He counted the jurors who would not convict because conviction meant a hanging. He counted the men who watched an execution in the morning and killed someone by nightfall. He counted the innocent...the farmer hanged for murdering a niece who came home two years later, the immigrant hanged on the word of the woman who ha...

A kaleidoscopic migraine compels the speaker to explore her kaleidoscopic parts: the mundane, domestic, disloyal, gritty, romantic, genetic, self-made, and vulnerable. Whether she finds the elusive "unified theory of self" is up to the reader. "Kat's poems thrum with kinetic energy....Through awkward and sometimes painful events, she shows us survival skills needed to rethink personal dreams using language that exposed hard-baked truths....She is a powerful advocate for the individual in u...

What is it like to have a loved one on death row?In What I Wish for You, Kat Bodrie offers an intimate portrait of friendship, hope, and endurance from years of corresponding with and visiting men living on North Carolina's death row. Moving from prison visitation booths and solitary confinement to ordinary suburban life, these poems reveal how love, grief, humor, injustice, and beauty exist all at once.Never preachy or sensational, What I Wish for You exp...

Basil Montagu did not write an argument against the death penalty. He did something harder to answer. He collected them.Beginning in 1809, a London barrister set out to gather every serious published opinion on capital punishment into one place and let the accumulated weight settle the question. He included his opponents. Paley, the most formidable defender of the English gallows, appears here in his own words, at length, uncut.This edition presents twelve of the voices Mon...

In this collaborative work, death row prisoner George T. Wilkerson, criminology professor Robert Johnson, and poet Kat Bodrie use poetry, prose, and fiction to explore the dynamics of life under sentence of death. Grounded in the first-hand experiences of the authors, and enriched by interviews and surveys with prisoners on death row, Bone Orchard examines the ways a death sentence poses unique existential and emotional burdens on the condemned and those who love them. "L...