A series of poems by Nick Flynn, used as satire/political poetry against the use and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

I want to like this more than it should. The writing is just.... not good... not my style... hard to follow.. uninteresting... just a lot of things wrong with it. Granted, I'm not the most poetic and understanding of poetry person there is.... but still.

A lot of this is just bad, and the end notes don't inspire much other than the sympathy for the detainees. The end notes actually makes me feel more for the detainees than the poems themselves, and thats mainly because of the seven testimonies.

Also, on the end notes, I'm not a fan of 'cribbing' from one writer to the next, especially when you can't even definitively say where you cribbed it from. He says for the one poem the one line came from some poem that he can't remember where... ...if you can't even remember what you are using or how.... its probably best not to use it.

Another poem, he uses a one-line poem in its entirety for one of his lines.

Maybe thats done more than I know of in the poetry world, and maybe its just a pet-peeve of mine, but it just seems like bad form. ( )