The Infected Desert

Harold Jaffe was among the most admired and versatile writers in the US for several decades, having written fiction, non-fiction, "docufiction," drama, and now, in The Infected Desert, what he called documentary poems. His subject is the Israeli war on the Palestinians which Jaffe addresses both through brief, tensely discerning free verse poems and actual documents which he reconstitutes so that the subtexts are revealed. Despite the cruel and maddening suppression of truth-telling about the war that is pervasive in the US, Jaffe had the courage to break through in order to do what documentary poems must do: "Tell truth to power."