Lethal Theater
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- ¥1,300
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- ¥1,300
発行者による作品情報
Reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, asking readers to consider the act and complications of looking at violence and suffering.
In Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison offers a stark and lyrical reckoning with the hidden architectures of the American prison system. These poems inhabit the charged territory where medicine and punishment converge, revealing how the body becomes both patient and instrument under state control. Moving through histories of wartime confinement, interrogation, and isolation, Nevison writes a poetry of witness to the carceral state, illuminating what is so often kept from view.
With precision and moral force, Nevison examines the shadows cast by medical experimentation on imprisoned bodies, the blurred boundary between hospital anesthesia and the drugs used in lethal injection protocols, and the rituals of surveillance that shape life behind bars. This is a work rooted in the medical humanities of confinement, an inquiry into how suffering is recorded, observed, and, at times, rendered invisible.
Lethal Theater makes visible the brutal logics beneath state-sanctioned pain and insists on the urgency—and responsibility—of looking closely at what the nation asks its incarcerated to endure.
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The title of Nevison's second collection (after Teratology) is drawn from ethnographer Dwight Conquergood's article "Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty." In these poems, Nevison leads us behind the scenes of a part-researched, part-imagined American prison system: "In the surgical theater, draw back the curtain so one can see the scene as it's been staged. Drape a sheet over the body before you begin." Nevison explores moments in history when prison inmates participated in dangerous medical experiments, such as the dermatological testing that occurred from the 1950s to the '70s in Philadelphia. While Nevison's first collection explored disability including her own through a zoomorphic lens, comparisons between prison inmates and animals do not prove as affecting in this collection: "The bars lash light across his pupils, eyes unshining, unlike those of better animals who stalk at night." Elsewhere, the incarcerated are described as "men deemed beyond/ repair work their daily recognitions:/ they toil and repeat their movements,/ until they replicate an old domestic rite,/ how wild dogs came down the mountains/ to sleep beside us, how over time/ we let them." At a time when writers and readers are questioning the appropriation of others' voices in poetry, this collection provides fertile ground for conversation.
