“Notorious enough to be nicknamed Torture Island, Rikers Island, home to one of the world’s largest correctional and mental institutions, has been the subject of our culture’s collective fascination for decades. I guarantee after you read Brandon Dean Lamson’s memoir Caged: A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur, you will never see that facility, nor prison education, kink, mindfulness, Richard Wright, or shame in quite the same way. On Rikers, as Lamson writes, ‘There were multiple literacies, various grids laid over the prisoners’ words and their worlds.’ This book guides us through those hybrid, polylingual, even nonverbal languages with an ethnographer’s eye and the rawness of reportage—from gang slang to institutional speech and literary allusion—always implicating the narrator in the narration, so that we are made complicit in the realization that prison education itself is a form of control and how solitary confinement is a kind of panopticon in reverse. As the men around him wrestle demons, Lamson stares down his own minotaur by confronting the violence in his own past with an unflinching poet’s heart that transforms trauma into beauty and fear into forgiveness. Caged is a potent lyrical reminder of the daily work that remains for each of us to do.”

—DR. RAVI SHANKAR, PUSHCART PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR OF CORRECTIONAL