Four Kinds of Justice

An Annotation From Accountable

Today I thought I’d borrow a page from Maggie Smith’s wonderful substack, Dear Life, in which she sometimes annotates or explains the origins and techniques of her poems. The poem above is from Accountable and opens the section of the book called Justice. I should note here that I have a section called Justice in my previous book, The 57 Bus, and in both books I intend the title to be somewhat ambiguous, or even ironic, because in both cases it’s hard to know what true justice would actually look like, even as the justice system marches on, confident of its own rectitude.

For Accountable, I wanted to talk about different ideas or systems of justice without going into the kind of dry explanation that might make a teen reader put down the book and pick up their phone for easier entertainment. So I turned to poetry.