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It turns out we were not alone in being struck weirdly by the image adorning a recent cover of Front Porch, the publication that goes out to members of the Arkansas Farm Bureau. (Wednesday update: A reader objected to my original crop of cover image, which was available on link I supplied, so I’ve substituted full image.)

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Another was Caleb Smith, a Fayetteville native who teaches English and American studies at Yale. It so happens he’s author of a prize-winning and widely lauded book, “The Prison and the American Imagination.” In it, he wrote of a “poetics of penitentiary” in which some seem to find something enobling in the redemption promised for servitude and degradation visited on American inmates.

But never mind me. Let’s just let Smith comment on the photo. (Parker Westbrook can comment on the illegal punctuation on the possessive of Arkansas — it’s Arkansas’s not Arkansas’, since a pedantic reader demands more info.) He sent us the letter below. “A bad joke,” he says, underlying a darker theme about prisons’ resegregation of America. “Cool watermelon recipes” indeed. His letter:

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