Literary Nonfiction. A collection of lyrical verse, consoling prose, and personal meditations on American culture.

"What if the art forms have so solidified as to be irrelevant to defy our political present? This question is one that so haunts David Matlin as to make his writing adequate to the monstrosity of our waning democratic years and days. IT MIGHT DO WELL WITH STRAWBERRIES contains all the components—poetic concision, political outrage, journalistic detail, self-fashioning, and a long historic vision—that make it possible to speak of language as public space: a critical wager of the imagination."—Roberto Tejada

Author City: SAN DIEGO, CA USA

David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books CHINA BEACH, DRESSED IN PROTECTIVE FASHION, and A HALFMAN DREAMER. His first novel, How the Night is Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. His most recent book, Prisons: Inside the New America from Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib, published by North Atlantic Books, is based on a ten-year experience teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. This extended essay is a discussion of the crisis of prisons, the invention of surplus populations, and how, in making prison our largest growth industry, we are mining our own civil disintegrations at unprecedented levels. David Matlin is an associate professor at San Diego State University and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.