Jonestown

Haunted by the People's Temple tragedy, Fraser Sutherland has, in this extraordinary long poem, reconstructed Jonestown in all its horror and dark comedy, as well as the career of its monstrous architect. Like a cracked mirror image of Christ, the shadow of Jones falls on every page—a hollow man who could not live outside the din of his own voice, a voice that Sutherland renders in the third person. Tracking Jones's perverse pilgrimage from Indiana to California to Guyana, Sutherland shows him melting at the edges so he becomes only a blundering instrument of control, a social chameleon, a monkey in the jungle.