Prisoners narrative poems by Jerome Gold ISBN 978-0930773-533

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Prisoners is a collection of short narratives, told in different voices, about the things that hold us captive: war, upbringing, personal trauma, history, belief, violence--especially violence. Each "voice" or character, tells the reader about himself or herself through a story, vignette, or series of vignettes. The narratives are thematically and emotionally linked. The dominant themes are violence and its effects, the ways in which these effects persist, how violence replicates itself from generation to generation, between friends, between brothers, between sisters. Half of Prisoners deals with the lives and experiences of gang youth, the other half with the society and history in which gangs are embedded..

Prisoners has been informed by the author's experience as a counselor in a prison for juveniles and from his earlier experience of war and its aftermath.

"Jerome Gold looks into the darkest corners of contemporary life, telling us without mercy exactly what he finds. The . . . author of The Inquisitor, Publishing Lives and The Negligence of Death, Gold creates intense, socially conscious, and emotionally evocative stories that remind us that we choose to deny unpleasant realities at the cost of enabling them to continue."   

            -- Judith Roche, The Stranger

"The dominant theme - violence - becomes a virus, conveyed down through the generations or between friends, siblings and lovers . . . .  A whiff of dark humor dances around the macabre and disquieting 'How It Can Happen,' a list of the ways people have been known to die . . . .  Another acridly funny poem is 'Who's Going to Kill Me' . . . Gold lampoons some entirely deserving subjects.  On the whole, Prisoners is intense, evocative, insightful . . . .  It is not for sissies.

            -- Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Tacoma News Tribune