In her new poetry collection, Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, both domestically and abroad. Exploring the multiple roles of medicine in incarceration, Nevison’s poems expose the psychological and physical pain felt by the prison system’s inhabitants. Nevison asks readers to consider the act and complications of looking—at the spectacle of punishment, isolation, and interrogation, as mapped onto incarcerated bodies—by those who participate in and enforce dangerous prison practices, those who benefit from the exploitation of incarcerated bodies, and those who bear witness to suffering. Unfolding in three sections, Nevison’s poems fluidly move among themes of isolation and violence in prisons during period of war, the history of medical experimentation on domestic prisoners, and the intersection between anesthesia used in hospital settings and anesthesia used in cases of lethal injection. Lethal Theater is an attempt to articulate and make visible a grotesque and overlooked part of American pain.

Susannah Nevison is the author of the poetry collection Teratology. She teaches at Sweet Briar College and her work has been published in the New York Times, Crazyhorse, and Tin House.