In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there is a prison there known as the Wire, where those suspected of terrorism are detained, oftentimes without formal charges brought against them. To pass the time, many of them have turned to writing poetry. Attorney Mark Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, discovered this and edited together a volume of detainee poetry entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

“It wasn’t just the first poem I’ve written in captivity,” says Moazzam Begg, a poet who was detained in Guantanamo for 3 years. “It’s the first poem I’ve ever written in my life of any meaning at all. It has particular significance because it describes, demonstrates and is a message to people outside of Guantanamo Bay of what I feel and what is happening around my surroundings.”

The poems, Falkoff says, are not at all a security risk, despite the army’s suggestion that the detainees were not writing for “the sake of art”, but rather using poetry as “another weapon to attack the Western ideals against which they are at war”.

You can read excerpts and listen to the full interview here.