Testimony

Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Charles Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late 19th- and early 20th-century America--the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease--in a radically stripped-down language of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.