American politics has long been shaped by a desire to make the nation a sort of rock-ribbed utopia. In the twentieth century this desire became a “jurismania” – a compulsion to catch every tremor of social life in a net of legal “rationality” – that criminalized so much of life that unprecedented levels of incarceration, particularly of minorities, were the result (Campos vii, 98). A critical moment in the rise of mass incarceration came in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan demanded that the country which “divine providence” itself had established be saved from the threat to it posed by drug abuse (“Address to the Nation”). Invoking a comic-strip version of the nation’s history that glossed over slavery, Jim Crow, and the negative impacts on the poor of his own efforts to dismantle “big government,” Reagan averred that “[w]e Americans have never been morally neutral against any form of tyranny” (Gray 110). Reagan’s rock-ribbed prose is a reminder of the value of the prismatic language of poets – especially those who have been caught up in the legislation written for comic-strip reality rather than the real thing.