Hayden Carruth's mottled document, The Bloomingdale Papers, opens with an appropriately horrifying apologia in prose that works: "Part of my illness was a need to do what I was told (in anger and under protest), so I did it. One of my doctors suggested that since I called myself a writer I should write something that might be helpful to him and his colleagues in their consideration of my case …" This, then, is a form of prison poetry, a genre we must not deprecate since … we are all a part of it…. (p. 228)

[Carruth] lucidly defends [the volume's] collagiste format from the reductionist label of "confessional" and underlines most vigorously its ambition and topos: "the inner condition of exile as the experience par excellence of the mid-twentieth century".

The poem begins with a blasted landscape out of Stevens: "It all begins on this November day. / The wintertime realities...