
The Boy Behind the Wall: Poems of Imprisonment and Freedom
By Dalton Harrison
POETRY
Deeply moving and life-changing book about the best and worst parts of ourselves, from childhood innocence to the trauma of the teenage years that lead to adulthood and prison.
The Boy Behind the Wall is a deeply moving and life-changing book about the best and worst parts of ourselves – the journey from childhood innocence to the trauma of the teenage years that lead to adulthood and prison. It takes you full circle through these harsh realities, with performance and poetry, and then back onto the long road out again. This is not trauma tourism: this is one person’s journey. One person’s truth. But when so many people who have been through the British prison system are now dead, murdered or missing, this is a truth that lives in the shadows of the Office for National Statistics, and in the places that the media fails to highlight.
This book is essential reading for anyone who works with children, families, prisoners or ex-offenders; for academics exploring intersectionality, gender transition from a trans male perspective, or prison life and probation in Britain; and for anyone with lived experience of feeling trapped in a place where they don’t belong.