Diaries of a Terrorist

Diaries of a Terrorist, the first full-length collection by Christopher Soto, rebukes systems of policing and those responsible for implementing them. Employing the first-person plural, Soto speaks in a multiplicity of voices, including those of witnesses to the murder of a neighbor by police (“We woke with no sleep // Yellow taped around our block”) and two hundred Indian women who lynched their rapist in a much-publicized act of vigilante justice:

Gored & gorge are words to describe a wound  Gorgeous
    // The opening
Of a blade inside his chest   Gorgeous // Black galaxies
    growing

Across his skin // We threw rocks // & Chili pepper
Arrest us all

Soto’s focus extends beyond jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers, to interrogate the social and cultural enforcement of normative gender and sexuality. At the center of this volume is “The Children In Their Little Bulletproof Vests,” an eight-page poem—set off from the rest of the work with a cover page and end page—about a poetry workshop for incarcerated boys. The poem’s stanzas stagger across the pages like brushstrokes:

                  […]
                                  Before each class
               We’d wash #C003 Rustic Red paint from
            Our nude nails then
            Exchange our black dresses
           For slim blue jeans
          Each body disciplined
         For its difference
   For its distance to
State power

Though they must conceal themselves within that carceral space, the speakers nevertheless share visions for a new future

   Together we
  Learned
To write
To wrought
The pain & make it
Beautiful.

Alongside its uncompromising portrait of injustice Diaries of a Terrorist also offers audacious glimmers of hope.