Concertina

"In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen-month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction. His new volume of poems, 'Concertina,' recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gan...