Regardless of how one feels about the United States' ongoing and obscured operations at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp , the camp's function relative to the current administration's War on Terror, etc., the recent publication of Poems from Guantanamo is inarguably thought-provoking. The New York Times Dan Chiasson writes that reading the book "is a bizarre experience ," a project best undertaken when one is "in the mood for some death-defying Orwellian back-flips." Of the book's subtitle, The Detainees Speak, Chiasson writes, "... [Putting] aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever 'speak' through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person's actual life story ... , in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by 'linguists with secret-level security clearance' but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale--'speak'?" Two poems from the collection can be read here .