Exegesis

ISSUE: Fall 2009

On Saturday, when I come to see
my brother, they call him, over loudspeaker,
to the tower—a small guardroom
at the entrance to the prison. I sign my name
in the book, write R0470—his number—
and agree to a search. I stand as if
I would make a snow angel in the air,
and the woman guard pats me down
lightly. Waiting for him, I consider

the squat room’s title; how it once meant
prison, and to the religious faithful, heaven.
Here, my brother has no use for these words,
this easy parsing. This time he tells me
he’s changed his name: Jo-ell instead of Joel—
name of the man who took our mother’s life—
his father, an inmate somewhere else.
Thinking only of words, I’d wanted to tell him
the name means prophet. That was before I knew

it had—for him—been a prison, too.

In Verse is supported by Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. This project is made possible with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by a broadcast partnership with Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey, a VQR contributing editor, served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (HMH, 2018), which was longlisted for the National Book Award; Thrall (HMH, 2012); Native Guard (Mariner, 2007), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002); and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Trethewey is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (Ecco, 2020). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Joshua Cogan

Joshua Cogan is a documentary photographer and anthropologist based in Washington, DC. His work for LiveHopeLove.com, based on his photojournalism alongside writer Kwame Dawes for “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica” (VQR, Spring 2008) was the winner of a News and Documentary Emmy Award and the Webby People’s Voice award.