Lethal Theater (Paperback or Softback)

Reckons with the rituals of violence that underpin the American prison system, asking readers to consider the act and complications of looking at violence and suffering.

In Lethal Theater, Susannah Nevison offers a stark and lyrical reckoning with the hidden architectures of the American prison system. These poems inhabit the charged territory where medicine and punishment converge, revealing how the body becomes both patient and instrument under state control. Moving through histories of wartime confinement, interrogation, and isolation, Nevison writes a poetry of witness to the carceral state, illuminating what is so often kept from view.

With precision and moral force, Nevison examines the shadows cast by medical experimentation on imprisoned bodies, the blurred boundary between hospital anesthesia and the drugs used in lethal injection protocols, and the rituals of surveillance that shape life behind bars. This is a work rooted in the medical humanities of confinement, an inquiry into how suffering is recorded, observed, and, at times, rendered invisible.

Lethal Theater makes visible the brutal logics beneath state-sanctioned pain and insists on the urgency―and responsibility―of looking closely at what the nation asks its incarcerated to endure.