106
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Huntersville prison where he leads the AA meetings. Bill finally got sober after deciding he was “‘sick and tired of being sick and tired.’” In his AA “drunkalogue,” Bill confesses that his alcoholism reached the point where he was “laid out on the sofa in his underwear,” and “he couldn’t even hold a glass.” The inmates light cigarettes and nod in recognition: There’s not much they don’t know about getting wasted: shoe polish, turpentine, Acqua Velva, deodorant. Most of them were fucked up the first time they went down – then every other fucking time after. Bill explains a drunk is always a drunk, always recovering. Unrequited thirst, yet to quench it is forbidden.
In “Prison AA,” addiction is portrayed as a more comprehensive form of incarceration, one that follows inmates on parole. In “Recidivism,” we learn of a prison guard, Albert Overcash, whose addiction and forgetting the “first principle of his profession: never trust a convict” lead him to a life behind the bars he had previously patrolled. Any reader who has managed (successfully or otherwise) any form of addiction can relate to Albert Overcash, who becomes another liaison between us and these incarcerated lives. In addition to the inmates Bathanti recalls from his fourteen months as a VISTA volunteer, Concertina includes characters from the literature of incarceration and comments on the ways that his interpretation of prison life is shaped by such writers as Dostoevsky, Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Robert Lowell.
In 2014, two North Carolina Awards were given for Literature, and both of the recipients, Lenard D. Moore and Alan Shapiro, are poets and university professors. The North Carolina Awards are the highest civilian awards given by the state of North Carolina. Eastern North Carolina native Moore was the first Southerner and the first African American to serve as president of the Haiku Society of America. He has also received the Haiku Museum of Tokyo Award, and he is executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. His haikus, which have appeared in numerous anthologies, have been translated into multiple languages. Moore founded the Carolina African American Writers Collective in 1992 and co-founded the Washington
Finally, there are inmates so surreal they seem to be the stuff of legend: the “dog-boys” of Salisbury camp are a “band of lifers,” who are uncannily attached to a bounty hunter named Luther, an “awful throwback man” on horseback and wearing a Stetson hat, who leads the dog-boys in pursuit of runaways. “Tetched from too long in jail,” the “dog boys” run “on all fours if need be.” More threatening than even these gothic animal-men are the inmates who seem most normal – such as Harold Furr, known as “Teddy Bear” for his pudgy body and “beard that looped // like a horseshoe ear to ear.” With his “Conway Twitty pompadour” and “mustache of a thirteen year old,” his tool belt and can of WD-40 that he uses on his rounds of prison maintenance, Teddy Bear hardly seems to deserve the reputation as the “baddest man in Huntersville Prison.” The young Bathanti spends his lunch breaks eating with Teddy Bear, pretending they are friends, pretending in his “romantic way” that he too is an “outlaw,” but all the while understanding that if he “so much as licked // a stamp for him,” he would become Teddy Bear’s thrall. A number of these poems comment on Bathanti’s newness to the mid-1970s South. Just as he learns to navigate the prison system in North Carolina, he simultaneously adjusts to the cultural landmines – most notably those related to race and religion. In “Doughnuts,” he learns to hold his tongue when he observes the enforced obeisance of a black inmate to the prison captain, a good old boy who thrives on the racial overtones of the prison’s power dynamic. In “Moonlite Avenue” he recalls being an apostate
PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHEW WAEHNER; COURTESY OF NC OFFICE OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
TWO 2014 NORTH CAROLINA AWARDS FOR LITERATURE
number 24