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American Inmate: The Album
A rigorous and defiant collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature.
Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetic voice is sharp and irreverent—improvisational yet thoughtful, musical, and tender, achieving a range of lyrical registers woven seamlessly throughout the book from the first to last poem.
Monson’s work challenges his readers with uncomfortable but essential, urgent, and necessary What does it mean to be in the world and yet live apart from it? What happens to the minds and bodies of those locked away? What happens to the minds and bodies of their loved ones? How can America get free? Braiding personal narrative with contemporary rap lyrics and institutional language, Monson deepens the nuances and dimensions of and within Asian American poetics, prison poetics, and hip-hop poetics with his deft and experimental writing style.
American Inmate speaks through cages, bars, walls, and borders, collapsing widespread misconceptions and stereotypes regarding incarceration, and shrinking the distance between readers on the outside and the complex interiority of an incarcerated human being. Sometimes slipping, sometimes soaring, sometimes laughing, sometimes dying, Monson’s fiery debut is a fresh, moving, elucidative work that will challenge readers to think more critically about the systems that govern our lives, to imagine with compassion and inclusivity, and to settle for nothing less than a truly free future that is liberatory for all.
Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetic voice is sharp and irreverent—improvisational yet thoughtful, musical, and tender, achieving a range of lyrical registers woven seamlessly throughout the book from the first to last poem.
Monson’s work challenges his readers with uncomfortable but essential, urgent, and necessary What does it mean to be in the world and yet live apart from it? What happens to the minds and bodies of those locked away? What happens to the minds and bodies of their loved ones? How can America get free? Braiding personal narrative with contemporary rap lyrics and institutional language, Monson deepens the nuances and dimensions of and within Asian American poetics, prison poetics, and hip-hop poetics with his deft and experimental writing style.
American Inmate speaks through cages, bars, walls, and borders, collapsing widespread misconceptions and stereotypes regarding incarceration, and shrinking the distance between readers on the outside and the complex interiority of an incarcerated human being. Sometimes slipping, sometimes soaring, sometimes laughing, sometimes dying, Monson’s fiery debut is a fresh, moving, elucidative work that will challenge readers to think more critically about the systems that govern our lives, to imagine with compassion and inclusivity, and to settle for nothing less than a truly free future that is liberatory for all.
80 pages, Paperback
Published March 12, 2024
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January 11, 2025
‘Language cannot answer what we ask of ourselves when we are alone,’ writes poet Justin Rovillos Monson, yet through his poems in American Inmate, his debut collection, we find him crafting language in ways where even loneliness speaks in tangible ways to resonate deep within us all. Written while serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) and dedicated to ‘my dogs in lockup, who have lived these words with me,’ Monson examines the day to day life where ‘I wake into this world over & over again’ while also cracking open the surface to extract the love, loneliness, hopes, dreams and beauty of the human spirit that still resides within the monotony and yearns to be heard. ‘To live within fences / is a muffled life,’ he writes, yet even within the confines of prison his voice takes flight and is heard loud and clear and full of indomitable beauty. 'This book here is my pebble in the shoe of the Prison Industrial Complex,' Monson writes in the acknowledgements and, with assured skill that moves between a multitude of formats, rhythms and direct imagery, American Inmate is an astounding work of vulnerable beauty promising amidst all the hardships that ‘I will never fade away.’
‘Tell them how blood & steel & longing
& all those avenues & streets compose a music
of endless search that trickles down like rain
upon the edge of our world & its religion
of warm flesh’
—from Notes For If I Fade Away
Charged as an adult and serving a sentence from which he hopes to be released in 2027, Justin Rovillos Monson spends much of the collection offering a heartfelt and harrowing portrait of the emotional currents that drive his days through incarceration. Yet, as he discusses in an interview with PEN America, ‘if I write a poem, is it a “prison poem”? Am I by necessity a “prison poet”? Why?’ While prison is certainly the confined landscape in which these poems exist, as the Walt Whitman line Monson quotes from Song of Myself states, ‘My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach’ and these poems stretch far beyond any prison walls and deep into the human heart where ‘no guard can shut me off.’ As he said to PEN America, his poems ‘blur some boundaries’ and should remind the reader that there is far more to an inmate and their writings than simply being a prisoner writing prison poetry:
Emotion radiates from every page. ‘I’m talking here about loneliness,’ he writes, ‘& the way our poetics has magnetized me’ and this collection is a brilliant reminder that words, and poetry, can break barriers, give voices in muffled places, and bring people together. ‘And I am more than my struggles,’ Monson says in an interview with Michigan Quarterly Review and here we share in his joys and desires as well. His poems draw from a vast array of references and voices that add rather charming and erudite textures to his work—like sharing an ear-bud with a friend to join in their music or passing along a favorite passage from a book—such as Hey Arnold!, Kendrick Lamar, Ye, James Baldwin, Jason Mraz, Jay-Z, literary critic James Wood, Method Man, and fellow Haymarket Books poet Maya Marshall. There is a real sense of musicality to many of these poems and a bold vulnerability to discuss emotions and social hardships that occasionally reminded me of Hanif Abdurraqib, yet Monson delivers a voice uniquely and wonderfully his own.
‘When I die let it be with the imprint
Of our shared mornings
Of brilliance we found in seeds
Of your dance & our hands
Fluttering like birds
Over the summer’s late lights’
—from Lockdown Poetics
There is certainly a harshness of confinement that edges into the poetry with his voice refusing to be subdued by it all. ‘There are mad days I don’t want to die but think of death,’ he writes in one of a series of poems titled Notes For If I Fade Away and many of these poems ache with vulnerability as Monson delivers stark portraits of incarcerated life. At the end of the book, along with the Liner Notes For the Real Ones which made me smile, Monson includes ‘Terms for the Uninitiated’ on the lexicon of prison language used in the poems. Here you find terms such as “Ayeright” (the ‘initiation of call and response in the MDOC…used to make sure inmates can hear one another') or “Thorazine Shuffle” (‘extremely slow, almost penguin-like walk most used by inmates who take medication. May be used to soak up a few extra moments of time outside of the cell before lockdown’) which guide the reader further into the every day life. Though one poem in particular hit me extra hard, At the End of the Day, which builds into a stylized image of prison redemption and camaraderie as seen in movies and then steps back to show a stark reality where the emptiness it delivers speaks just as loud as any words (forgive the formatting, goodreads limited format options can’t quite match that in the book):
At The End of the Day
A ratag ball team
we stand in a cipher
Huddle & high five, promise to call each other’s people
once released into the world & to write letters
& put money on our homies’ books & some cry
& some laugh & some stay stone-faced with bangers
In their waistbands
& we jump with out feet kicked back
in the air like the Wayans brothers in prison
blues & we freeze-frame
for the movie we’re all in to audition for
American History X / Prison Song
American Me / Shawshank Redemption
South Central / Doing Hard Time
We don’t freeze-fram for the movie
we’re all in to audition for &we don’t jump
with our feet kicked back in the air
like the Wayans brothers in prison blues
& some don’t stay
stone-faced with banger in their waistbands & some
don’t laugh & some don’t cry & we don’t put money
on our homies’ books & write letters, promise to call
each other’s people once released into the world
& we don’t huddle & high five
We don’t stand in a cipher
A ragtag ball team
At the end of the day
Truth is, we look away
Though not everything here is about sadness and love still permeates these poems. The poem Ode to the Dozens Ending With Me & My Dogs is a heartfelt poem for those he connected with inside. ‘Picture this,’ he writes, ‘me & my dogs giving no fucks / about who’s the shooter, who’s the victim,’ to show the lack of judgement withing his circle, a grace few on the outside would likely offer. There are also poems of the joy that comes from receiving a letter, from having an ex say she misses him. And it hard times, love is always so powerful.
‘This is what love does: you climb the tallest tree
Only to discover a sky so wide you swear
No word could contain it
Then you jump & you fall
Until a song ascends to lift you’
—from You Must Learn to Climb
Another highlight of the collection is the final series of poems, Pre-Sentence Investigation (JSTLKMVMT Remix), the longest in the collection at 20 pages. It rotates between cold, dehumanizing documents from the Department of Correction in italics with the speaker's voice discussing the crime for which they are incarcerated. There is a sense of the human voice aching its way back to the center and focus as the legal forms try to shove it aside as if ‘in custody, a prisoner, the other.’ After the back and forth, Monson asks the reader to ‘decide whether I have told you the truth or have lied, whether I am guilt or innocent.’ Every day the fate of human lives face the decision of innocent or guilty by judges and juries in a country where there is a notable racial disparity in sentencing and Monson asks ‘how do you decide which stories to pull truth from like teeth, assembling a new mouth, one of delivered justice?’ The act of putting the reader in the position to decide forces us to confront our feelings, our sense of morality, asks us why and for what reason. He closes the collection telling the reader ‘This–what we’re doing here: you, reading; me, writing–is a trial.’ With the page as courtroom, the reader as judge and jury, he looks into our hearts as he tells us to ask ourselves ‘What kind of man do I want living next door?’ Moments like this is why poetry is so powerful, moments like this is what makes art worthwhile, moments like this is why you should certainly read this collection.
‘All my favorite poets are women & gods’
Justin Rovillos Monson’s American Inmate is a gorgeously written and powerful collection that reminds us of the humanity we keep locked away and society averts its eyes from. These are poems of longing, loneliness, love and more and each hits right in the depth of the heart. It is also a good reminder why we should support those who are incarcerated, to give warmth and empathy, and these poems written while inside almost makes me think about how in the US the largest censorship of books occurs within prisons, something often ignored in all the press about book bans. Definitely take a look at how you can help get books to inmates, such as the program through Monson’s publisher—Haymarket Books—Books Not Bars which you can read about HERE, as well as check out the Prison Book Network HERE. American Inmate is an important and impressive collection and I will eagerly read anything Monson writes in the future.
5/5
‘Tell them how blood & steel & longing
& all those avenues & streets compose a music
of endless search that trickles down like rain
upon the edge of our world & its religion
of warm flesh’
—from Notes For If I Fade Away
Charged as an adult and serving a sentence from which he hopes to be released in 2027, Justin Rovillos Monson spends much of the collection offering a heartfelt and harrowing portrait of the emotional currents that drive his days through incarceration. Yet, as he discusses in an interview with PEN America, ‘if I write a poem, is it a “prison poem”? Am I by necessity a “prison poet”? Why?’ While prison is certainly the confined landscape in which these poems exist, as the Walt Whitman line Monson quotes from Song of Myself states, ‘My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach’ and these poems stretch far beyond any prison walls and deep into the human heart where ‘no guard can shut me off.’ As he said to PEN America, his poems ‘blur some boundaries’ and should remind the reader that there is far more to an inmate and their writings than simply being a prisoner writing prison poetry:
‘If we really want to push social change, then the ways we talk about, and recognize the actions of, incarcerated individuals need to transcend both liberal and conservative dialect…I want to be able to lay out my own body and mind, not the sentiments of “the prisoner” as an abstraction or idea.’
Emotion radiates from every page. ‘I’m talking here about loneliness,’ he writes, ‘& the way our poetics has magnetized me’ and this collection is a brilliant reminder that words, and poetry, can break barriers, give voices in muffled places, and bring people together. ‘And I am more than my struggles,’ Monson says in an interview with Michigan Quarterly Review and here we share in his joys and desires as well. His poems draw from a vast array of references and voices that add rather charming and erudite textures to his work—like sharing an ear-bud with a friend to join in their music or passing along a favorite passage from a book—such as Hey Arnold!, Kendrick Lamar, Ye, James Baldwin, Jason Mraz, Jay-Z, literary critic James Wood, Method Man, and fellow Haymarket Books poet Maya Marshall. There is a real sense of musicality to many of these poems and a bold vulnerability to discuss emotions and social hardships that occasionally reminded me of Hanif Abdurraqib, yet Monson delivers a voice uniquely and wonderfully his own.
‘When I die let it be with the imprint
Of our shared mornings
Of brilliance we found in seeds
Of your dance & our hands
Fluttering like birds
Over the summer’s late lights’
—from Lockdown Poetics
There is certainly a harshness of confinement that edges into the poetry with his voice refusing to be subdued by it all. ‘There are mad days I don’t want to die but think of death,’ he writes in one of a series of poems titled Notes For If I Fade Away and many of these poems ache with vulnerability as Monson delivers stark portraits of incarcerated life. At the end of the book, along with the Liner Notes For the Real Ones which made me smile, Monson includes ‘Terms for the Uninitiated’ on the lexicon of prison language used in the poems. Here you find terms such as “Ayeright” (the ‘initiation of call and response in the MDOC…used to make sure inmates can hear one another') or “Thorazine Shuffle” (‘extremely slow, almost penguin-like walk most used by inmates who take medication. May be used to soak up a few extra moments of time outside of the cell before lockdown’) which guide the reader further into the every day life. Though one poem in particular hit me extra hard, At the End of the Day, which builds into a stylized image of prison redemption and camaraderie as seen in movies and then steps back to show a stark reality where the emptiness it delivers speaks just as loud as any words (forgive the formatting, goodreads limited format options can’t quite match that in the book):
At The End of the Day
A ratag ball team
we stand in a cipher
Huddle & high five, promise to call each other’s people
once released into the world & to write letters
& put money on our homies’ books & some cry
& some laugh & some stay stone-faced with bangers
In their waistbands
& we jump with out feet kicked back
in the air like the Wayans brothers in prison
blues & we freeze-frame
for the movie we’re all in to audition for
American History X / Prison Song
American Me / Shawshank Redemption
South Central / Doing Hard Time
We don’t freeze-fram for the movie
we’re all in to audition for &we don’t jump
with our feet kicked back in the air
like the Wayans brothers in prison blues
& some don’t stay
stone-faced with banger in their waistbands & some
don’t laugh & some don’t cry & we don’t put money
on our homies’ books & write letters, promise to call
each other’s people once released into the world
& we don’t huddle & high five
We don’t stand in a cipher
A ragtag ball team
At the end of the day
Truth is, we look away
Though not everything here is about sadness and love still permeates these poems. The poem Ode to the Dozens Ending With Me & My Dogs is a heartfelt poem for those he connected with inside. ‘Picture this,’ he writes, ‘me & my dogs giving no fucks / about who’s the shooter, who’s the victim,’ to show the lack of judgement withing his circle, a grace few on the outside would likely offer. There are also poems of the joy that comes from receiving a letter, from having an ex say she misses him. And it hard times, love is always so powerful.
‘This is what love does: you climb the tallest tree
Only to discover a sky so wide you swear
No word could contain it
Then you jump & you fall
Until a song ascends to lift you’
—from You Must Learn to Climb
Another highlight of the collection is the final series of poems, Pre-Sentence Investigation (JSTLKMVMT Remix), the longest in the collection at 20 pages. It rotates between cold, dehumanizing documents from the Department of Correction in italics with the speaker's voice discussing the crime for which they are incarcerated. There is a sense of the human voice aching its way back to the center and focus as the legal forms try to shove it aside as if ‘in custody, a prisoner, the other.’ After the back and forth, Monson asks the reader to ‘decide whether I have told you the truth or have lied, whether I am guilt or innocent.’ Every day the fate of human lives face the decision of innocent or guilty by judges and juries in a country where there is a notable racial disparity in sentencing and Monson asks ‘how do you decide which stories to pull truth from like teeth, assembling a new mouth, one of delivered justice?’ The act of putting the reader in the position to decide forces us to confront our feelings, our sense of morality, asks us why and for what reason. He closes the collection telling the reader ‘This–what we’re doing here: you, reading; me, writing–is a trial.’ With the page as courtroom, the reader as judge and jury, he looks into our hearts as he tells us to ask ourselves ‘What kind of man do I want living next door?’ Moments like this is why poetry is so powerful, moments like this is what makes art worthwhile, moments like this is why you should certainly read this collection.
‘All my favorite poets are women & gods’
Justin Rovillos Monson’s American Inmate is a gorgeously written and powerful collection that reminds us of the humanity we keep locked away and society averts its eyes from. These are poems of longing, loneliness, love and more and each hits right in the depth of the heart. It is also a good reminder why we should support those who are incarcerated, to give warmth and empathy, and these poems written while inside almost makes me think about how in the US the largest censorship of books occurs within prisons, something often ignored in all the press about book bans. Definitely take a look at how you can help get books to inmates, such as the program through Monson’s publisher—Haymarket Books—Books Not Bars which you can read about HERE, as well as check out the Prison Book Network HERE. American Inmate is an important and impressive collection and I will eagerly read anything Monson writes in the future.
5/5
July 17, 2024
"this book here is my pebble in the shoe of the Prison Industrial Complex"
Quick read with a lot of quotable and insightful lines about the carceral system. There's a lot of music references that I might not have fully grasped because I lack familiarity with the referenced material.
The language and style used are very approachable and there's a great sense musicality and rhythm to the whole book which made it extremely easy to engage with and I did not see my time with it fly. I almost regret not getting a physical copy to annotate!
I was initially not going to rate it because of the memoir aspect but since I rated I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love (another poetry book with a memoir aspect) I'll spare myself some thinking and I'll defer to past-me's judgement and rate this one too.
Quick read with a lot of quotable and insightful lines about the carceral system. There's a lot of music references that I might not have fully grasped because I lack familiarity with the referenced material.
The language and style used are very approachable and there's a great sense musicality and rhythm to the whole book which made it extremely easy to engage with and I did not see my time with it fly. I almost regret not getting a physical copy to annotate!
I was initially not going to rate it because of the memoir aspect but since I rated I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love (another poetry book with a memoir aspect) I'll spare myself some thinking and I'll defer to past-me's judgement and rate this one too.
April 8, 2024
I am preparing for an emergency shakedown/
I wake into this world over & over again
I wake into this world over & over again
February 23, 2024
(4.5 rounded up) I would say that I can't imagine how much work, and just how many people it takes to publish a work whilst incarcerated; but from the chuck of acknowledgements in the back of the book, that gives a fairly decent idea.
Simultaneously a tribute to poets past, rappers of now, prominent Black authors and a personal memior in verse; Monson captures a look into the complex life and emotions that come with being incarcerated. From maintaining relationships outside of lock-up, to the friendships and mentorships made within. Especially for what (I'm assuming) is a debut work, to put somewhat ineloquently- the poems slap. My minor, and personal, docking of a .5 star is only because the flow and rhythm felt wonky at times, but again, that's a super personal preference.
I would still highly recommend.
Simultaneously a tribute to poets past, rappers of now, prominent Black authors and a personal memior in verse; Monson captures a look into the complex life and emotions that come with being incarcerated. From maintaining relationships outside of lock-up, to the friendships and mentorships made within. Especially for what (I'm assuming) is a debut work, to put somewhat ineloquently- the poems slap. My minor, and personal, docking of a .5 star is only because the flow and rhythm felt wonky at times, but again, that's a super personal preference.
I would still highly recommend.
March 6, 2026
Really moving poems. Best line: “Im not thirsty for blood; I just want to be with you & alone at the same time”. The eponymous poem—despite being quite simple in structure and rhyming—something im not usually a fan of—is incredible.
August 19, 2025
Testament to modern poetry and art in general, I want to put a copy of this in everyone's hands
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November 10, 2024Notables 2024 #106
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