I'm Kim Yakonatis. This is NPR's Book of the Day. Today's book aims to bring a new

vividness and tangibility to the abuses of the criminal justice system. Redaction is a

collaboration by poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts and artist Tit Titus Kaffar, and originally took form as a 2019

art exhibition at New York's MoMA PS1. Now, in coffee table book form, the work combines

etched portraits of incarcerated people and poems created via redacted court documents.

Betts and Kaffar chat here with NPR's Wana Summers about the argumentative start

to their project. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars,

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I am holding in my hands a copy of a cloth-bound coffee table-sized book that its creator say is meant to be torn apart the way that, as a kid, you might have ripped full pages out of a magazine to hang them on the wall of your bedroom. The book is redaction. It's a collaboration between poet and activist Reginald Dwayne Betts and artist Titus Kaffar.

Inside these pages, Kaffar etches searing portraits, and they're paired with poems written by Betts that are based on redacted lawsuits.

Betz, who is also an attorney, saw an opportunity in those words.

So what I decided I wanted to do was turn it into a poem.

And I wanted to use redaction as a tool of revelation, as a tool to say something meaningful about what's there that you aren't noticing.

Betz and Kafar's project first exhibited at MoMA PS1 back in 2019, but I wanted to know how they

came to work together. And it turns out it started as a blind introduction at a dinner party.

And it was one of those dinner parties where, you know, I don't know what your experience is like,

but my experience is like living here sometimes. People are like, I have this friend that you really need to meet. And my first thought is they're black, right? It's because they're black. Like, we're both black. So you want us to meet. And I was like, I don't want to go through this situation at another party. But I show up. I start talking this dude and like within minutes,

we are arguing with one another going at it about, about Tana Hosecote's book between the world

and me. And we are definitely coming from different positions. We disregard basically everybody

...