What do you think?
Rate this book
In Chambers: The Bodhisattva of the Public Defender's Office
Poetry. IN CHAMBERS captures the feel of practicing criminal defense while maintaining a philosophical approach to preserving the freedom and dignity of the individual. Krech explains the US legal system in an accessible way and firmly says No! to the injustices in it without stridency or anger. This collection is inspiring both as poetry as well as legal insight.
48 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2008
7 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 12, 2008
"The jury not only deliberating my client's fate this time, but their own as well: will they too be guilty of murder?" from "Premeditated Deliberated & Intentional"
I have always had a mild fascination with the legal system and the idea of justice. In the fact that everyone is presumed innocence until proven guilty, and how lives stand waiting for the facts to build in one direction of the other. The position of the defense attorney is noble, and at times morally challenging. To defend someone who is clearly guilty of a violent crime must be trying, and in Richard Krech's latest chapbook, In Chambers, he writes inventive poems about life in and around the court room.
"The advocate strides into the hell-worlds of the steel bars, of the squeezing tongues and hungry ghosts."
A Bodhisattva is a being that is so enlightened that they refuse Nirvana in order stay and fight for others to achieve Nirvana. Some texts refer to this person as a "Buddha in training". To think of an attorney as a person who is forgoing their own happiness to fight for the happiness and freedom of others is, for me at least, a marvelous revelation. The poems in this collection paint that exact picture, it is a battle but there is a constant hope that justice will outweigh evil, and that the truth of fact and evidence will serve its purpose.
I have always had a mild fascination with the legal system and the idea of justice. In the fact that everyone is presumed innocence until proven guilty, and how lives stand waiting for the facts to build in one direction of the other. The position of the defense attorney is noble, and at times morally challenging. To defend someone who is clearly guilty of a violent crime must be trying, and in Richard Krech's latest chapbook, In Chambers, he writes inventive poems about life in and around the court room.
"The advocate strides into the hell-worlds of the steel bars, of the squeezing tongues and hungry ghosts."
A Bodhisattva is a being that is so enlightened that they refuse Nirvana in order stay and fight for others to achieve Nirvana. Some texts refer to this person as a "Buddha in training". To think of an attorney as a person who is forgoing their own happiness to fight for the happiness and freedom of others is, for me at least, a marvelous revelation. The poems in this collection paint that exact picture, it is a battle but there is a constant hope that justice will outweigh evil, and that the truth of fact and evidence will serve its purpose.
December 24, 2010
Krech's career in law bears poetic fruit; most interesting to me was the collision of freedom and order and how they don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews