B. Batchelor writes, with unsparing precision, about life in a cage. "This is not / a gentle place / everything hurt /and hardened / into feral survival." In searing images, Disfigured Hours bears witness to the daily, sometimes hourly, cruelties of America's carceral behemoth. These twenty-four poems - each with sixty syllables, representing the minutes in the hour - offer a record of both human and inhumane moments experienced during more than two decades behind bars. In lyric, haunting, and stark detail, Batchelor conjures not the prison stereotypes we know from pop culture, but the full, textured, inner landscape of a man with no escape.
Testimonials
B. Batchelor's poems are dazzling, incantatory, alive. Disfigured Hours is a lasting document of self-assertion and witness, of endurance and light. -Kaveh Akbar
In Disfigured Hours, B. Batchelor brings us to the exact moments experience snags on all that is harsh. What's torn away in life is transformed into the art within these lines. His is a voice that
carries a spectral perspective. But this work is more than a montage from within prison walls. We are continually asked to turn inward, in a crucial kind of meditation, where what is tender can flourish. Disfigured Hours draws from the kind of tenacity honest remembrance demands — a precise witnessing like the slicing of a clock's hands — and I couldn't be more grateful. -Michael Torres
B. Batchelor captures searing emotion and ordeal, as he achingly asks, "What of myself / can I make tinder // that hasn't been damp / and petrified for years?" This elegant poetry, rich in detail and language, yet spare and understated, brilliantly explores identity, humility, and the limits of humanity. Batchelor is expert at the art of compression, offering twenty-four poems, each with sixty syllables to represent one day of thirty years of incarceration: "each poem an hour, each syllable a minute." Despite the lines, "I reflect no light. / I am a dead lake," these poems are luminous. This impressive collection will leave you changed. -Ellen Bass
B. Batchelor's Disfigured Hours makes of poetic constraint an indictment. Here, time is made material: shaped, bruised, and bruising. The poems are tender, direct, and through them--no, with them we are marked, we are changed. -Donika Kelly
B. Batchelor is a poet and artist, a 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow, a 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize in Poetry finalist, and recipient of multiple awards from PEN America. His poems have appeared in The Nation, Columbia Journal, cream city review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minnesota.
"B. Batchelor's poems are dazzling, incantatory, alive. Disfigured Hours is a lasting document of self-assertion and witness, of endurance and light." — Kaveh Akbar
"In Disfigured Hours, B. Batchelor brings us to the exact moments experience snags on all that is harsh. What's torn away in life is transformed into the art within these lines. His is a voice that carries a spectral perspective. But this work is more than a montage from within prison walls. We are continually asked to turn inward, in a crucial kind of meditation, where what is tender can flourish. Disfigured Hours draws from the kind of tenacity honest remembrance demands — a precise witnessing like the slicing of a clock's hands — and I couldn't be more grateful." — Michael Torres
"B. Batchelor captures searing emotion and ordeal, as he achingly asks, 'What of myself / can I make tinder // that hasn't been damp / and petrified for years?' This elegant poetry, rich in detail and language, yet spare and understated, brilliantly explores identity, humility, and the limits of humanity. Batchelor is expert at the art of compression, offering twenty-four poems, each with sixty syllables to represent one day of thirty years of incarceration: 'each poem an hour, each syllable a minute.' Despite the lines, 'I reflect no light. / I am a dead lake,' these poems are luminous. This impressive collection will leave you changed." — Ellen Bass
"B. Batchelor's Disfigured Hours makes of poetic constraint an indictment. Here, time is made material: shaped, bruised, and bruising. The poems are tender, direct, and through them--no, with them we are marked, we are changed." — Donika Kelly
