Kat Bodrie – författare

What is it like to have a loved one on death row?In What I Wish for You, Kat Bodrie offers an intimate portrait of friendship, hope, and endurance from years of corresponding with and visiting men living on North Carolina's death row. Moving from prison visitation booths and solitary confinement to ordinary suburban life, these poems reveal how love, grief, humor, injustice, and beauty exist all at once.Never preachy or sensational, What I Wish for You explores what it means to witness another person's suffering without turning away. These poems do not excuse harm. They meditate on mercy, relationships, and the dignity that survives even under a system built to erase it. Deeply personal and urgently relevant, this collection is about seeing the person behind the sentence—and discovering that compassion may be the most radical act of all.

Basil Montagu did not write an argument against the death penalty. He did something harder to answer. He collected them.Beginning in 1809, a London barrister set out to gather every serious published opinion on capital punishment into one place and let the accumulated weight settle the question. He included his opponents. Paley, the most formidable defender of the English gallows, appears here in his own words, at length, uncut.This edition presents twelve of the voices Montagu assembled. Samuel Johnson on why severity teaches criminals to take larger risks. Blackstone on where the state's right to punish comes from and what that origin forbids. Beccaria on the authority the state never had. Montesquieu on cruelty as the mark of despotism. Clarkson on the Philadelphia penitentiary, where men worked at trades and came out reformed. Goldsmith on penal laws made by the rich and laid upon the poor. Howard on what he found in the prisons of Europe. Turner on the Scripture that supposedly commands the gallows.And Patrick Colquhoun's catalogue: page after page of the acts that carried death in England, from murder to breaking a fish pond. It is the single most devastating thing in the book, and Colquhoun does almost nothing but list them.